
GEOUGE AUGUSTUS SALA, 

THE AUTHOR OF k< TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK.." 



TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK; 



HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT 
IN LONDON. 



GEOBGE AUGUSTUS SALA, 

AUTHOR OF A " JOURNEY DUE NORTH," "GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT," ETC. ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED WITH 

A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR, AND NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS ON 
WOOD, PROM DRAWINGS BY WILLIAM M'CONNELL. 



LONDON : 

HOULSTON AND WRIGHT, PATERNOSTER ROW. 






LONDON : 

HENRY VIZETELLY, PRINTER AND ENGRAVER, 

GOTTGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET. 






/ 1 



PREFACE. 



TO AUGUSTUS MAYHEW. 

Had I not fifty other valid reasons — -did I not feel myself impelled to 
such a course by the long years of affectionate intercourse which have 
cast sunshine on that highway of life, of which the shadier side of the 
road has been apportioned to me, I should still, my dear Augustus $ 
dedicate this book to you. I could show, I hope, my affection and 
esteem in other ways ; but to address to you the Epistle Dedicatory of 
"Twice Round the Clock" is only your due, in justice and in courtesy. 
Civility is not so common a quality among the Eminent British 
Authors of the day, and mutual admiration is not so plentifully dis- 
played by our Fieldings and Smolletts of 1859, that we middling and 
middle-class ink-spillers can afford to throw away a chance of saying 
a kind or civil thing to one another in the right way and in the right 
place. Do you, therefore, say something neat and complimentary about 
me in the preface to your next book ; and I only trust that the task 
will confer as sincere a pleasure on you as it confers on me at this 
moment. 

But I might still, I must admit, admire you very much, without 
that admiration giving you a Right to the Dedication of a Book relat- 
ing exclusively to London Life and London Manners in the nineteenth 
century. Herein, however, rests, I think, your claim : That you are 
the author of a capital book called " Paved with Gold," replete with 



VI PREFACE. 

the finest and shrewdest observation drawn from the scenes we have 
both delighted to survey, to study, and to describe, and of which book, 
although the basis was romantic fiction, the numerous episodes were 
picturesque but eminently faithful photographs of fact. I should have 
liked, myself, to tell the story of a prize fight, of a ratting match, or 
of a boy's low lodging-house, in my own way, and in these pages ; but 
I shrank from the attempt after your graphic narratives in " Paved 
with Gold." And, again, have you not been for years the fellow- 
labourer of your brother Henry, in those deeply-tinted but unalter- 
ably-veracious studies of London Life, of which we have the results 
in " Labour and the Poor" and in the " Great World of London?" 
Of how many prisons, workhouses, factories, work-rooms, have you 
not told the tale ? of how many dramas of misery and poverty have you 
not been the chronicler? Let us bow to the great ones of letters, 
and, reading their books with a hearty, honest admiration, confess that 
the capacity to produce such master-pieces is not given to us ; but let 
us, on our own parts, put in a modest claim to the recognition and 
approval of the public. Please remember the reporters. Please not 
to forget the bone-grubbers. Fling a pennyworth of praise to the 
excavators and night-watchmen who have at least industriously 
laboured to collect materials wherefrom better painters may execute 
glowing tableaux of London Life. At least, we have toiled to bring 
together our tale of bricks, that by the hand of genius they may be 
erected some day into a Pyramid. At least, we have endeavoured to 
our utmost to describe the London of our day as we have seen it, and 
as we know it ; and, in the words of the judicious Master Hooker — of 
whose works, my Augustus, I am afraid you are not a very sedulous 
student — we have worked early and late on London, and have done our 
best to paint the infinitely-varied characteristics of its streets and 
its population, " Tho' for no other cause, yet for this, that Posteritie 
may know we have not looselie, thro 5 silence, permitted thinges to 
pass away as in a dreame ; there shall be for men's information extant 
thus much concerning the present state of" — London. 

So you see, my dear friend, that I have dedicated my work to you; 
and that, bon gre, mal gre, you have been saddled with the dignity of 
its Patron. I might have addressed you in heroic verse, and with 



PREFACE. Til 

your name in capitals ; and, in the manner of Mr. Alexander Pope, 
bidden you : — 

u Awake, my Mayhew : leave all meaner things 
To low ambition and the pride of kings." 

I believe your present ambition extends only to few-acre farming and 
the rearing of poultry, and I might well exhort you to return to your 
literary pursuits, and to leave the Dorkings and Cochin Chinas alone. 
But I refrain. Am I to insult my Patron with advice r Do I expect any 
reward for my dedication ? Will your Lordship send me a handful of 
broad-pieces for my flattery's sake by the hands of your gentleman's 
gentleman ? Will you put me down for the next vacancy as a Com- 
missioner of Hackney Coaches, or the next reversion for a snug sine- 
cure connected with the Virginia Plantations or the Leeward Islands: 
Will your Lordship invite me to dinner at your country-seat, and place 
me between Lady Betty and the domestic chaplain ? May I write 
rhyming epitaphs for her ladyship's pug-dog, untimely deceased from 
excess of cream and chicken ? Or will you speak to Mr. Secretary in 
my behalf, lest that last paper of mine against Ministers in ''Mist's 
Weekly Journal" should draw down on me the ex-officio wrath of 
Mr. Attorney-General, and cause my ears to be nailed to the pillory? 
Can I ever hope to crack a bottle in your Lordship's society at 
Button's, or to see your Lordship's coach- and-six before my lodgings 
in Little Britain ? Let us be thankful, rather, that the species of 
literary patronage at which I have hinted exists no longer, and that 
an Author has no need to toady his Patron in order to make him his 
friend. For what more in cordiality and kind-fellowship I could say, 
you will, I am sure, give me credit. When friendship is paraded too 
much in public, its entire sincerity may be open to doubt. I am 
afraid that Orestes, so affectionate on the stage, has often declined in 
the green-room to lend Pylades sixpence ; and I am given to under- 
stand, that Damon has often come down from the platform, where he 
has been saying such flourishing fine things about Pythias, and in 
private life has spoken somewhat harshly of that worthy. 

You will observe that, with the economy which we should all 
strive to inculcate in an age of Financial Reform, I have made 
these remarks to serve two ends. You are to take them, if you please. 



Till PREFACE. 

as a Dedication. The public will be good enough to accept them 
as a Preface. But as the dedicatory has hitherto disproportionately 
exceeded the prefatory matter, a few words on my part are due to 
that great body- corporate of Patrons whom some delight to call 
the "many-headed monster;" some the " million ;" some the fickle, 
ungrateful, and exigent — and some the generous, forbearing, and 
discerning British Public. 

The papers I have now collected into a volume under the title 
of "Twice Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night 
in London,' ' were originally published in the pages of the " Wel- 
come Guest," a weekly periodical whose first and surprising success 
must be mainly ascribed to the taste and spirit of its original pro- 
prietor, Mr. Henry Vizetelly. I confess that I thought as little of 
u Twice Round the Clock'' in the earlier hours of its publication 
as the critics of the Saturday Review — -who, because I contributed 
for six years to another periodical whose conductor they hold in hatred, 
have been pleased to pursue me with an acharnement quite exciting 
to experience — may think of it, now. I looked upon the articles as 
mere ephemeral essays, of a description of which I had thrown off 
hundreds during a desultory, albeit industrious, literary career. 
But I found ere long that I had committed myself to a task whose 
items were to form an Entirety in the end ; that I had begun the 
first act of a Drama which imperatively demanded working out to 
its catastrophe. I grew more interested in the thing; I took more 
pains; I felt myself spurred to accuracy by the conscientious zeal 
of the admirable artist, Mr. William M'Connell, whose graphic and 
truthful designs embellished my often halting text. I found, to my 
great surprise, that the scenes and characters I had endeavoured to 
embody were awakening feelings of curiosity and interest among 
the many thousand readers of the journal to which I contributed. 
The work, such as it is, was in the outset not very deliberately 
planned. I can only regret now, when it is terminated, that the 
details I have sometimes only glanced at were not more elaborately 
and completely carried out. 

It would be a sorry piece of vanity on my part to imagine that the 
conception of the History of a Day and Night in London is original. 



PREFACE. IX 

I will tell you how I came to think of the scheme of " Twice Round 
the Clock." Four years ago, in Paris, my then Master in literature, 
Mr. Charles Dickens, lent me a little thin octavo volume, which, I 
believe, had been presented to him by another Master of the craft, 
Mr. Thackeray, entitled — but I will transcribe the title-page in full. 

LOW LIFE; 

OR, ONE HALF THE WOULD KNOWS NOT HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVE, 

Being a Critical Account of what is Transacted by People of almost all Eeligions, 
Nations, Circumstances, and Sizes of Understanding, in the 

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, 

BETWEEN 

SATURDAY NIGHT AND MONDAY MORNING. 

In a true Description of a 
SUNDAY, 

As it is usually spent within the Bills of Mortality, calculated for the 
twenty-first of June. 

WITH AN ADDRESS TO THE INGENIOUS AND INGENUOUS MR. HOGARTH. 

Let Fancy guess the rest. — Buckingham. 

The date of publication is not given ; but internal evidence proves 
the Opuscule to have been written during the latter part of the reign of 
George the Second; and in the copy I now possess, and which I bought 
at a " rarity " price, at a sale where it was ignorantly labelled among 
the "facetice" — it is the saddest book, perhaps, that ever was written 
— in my copy, which is bound up among some rascally pamphlets, there 
is written on 'the fly-leaf the date 1759. Just one hundred years ago, 
you see. The work is anonymous ; but in a manuscript table of con- 
tents to the collection of miscellanies of which it forms part, I find 
written " By Tom Legge." The epigraph says that it " is printed for 
the author, and is to be sold by T. Legg, at the Parrot, Green 
Arbour Court, in the Little Old Bailey." Was the authorship mere 
guess-work on the part of the owner of the book, or was " Tom Legge " 
really the writer of " Low Life," and, if so, who was " Tom Legge ? " 
Mr. Peter Cunningham, or a contributor to " Notes and Queries," may 
be able to inform us. I have been thus particular, for a reason : 
that this thin octavo is one of the minutest, the most graphic — and 
while in parts coarse as a scene from the " Rake's Progress," — the 



X PREFACE. 

most pathetic, picture of London life a century since that has ever 
been written. There are passages in it irresistibly reminding one 
of Goldsmith ; but the offensive and gratuitous coarseness in the next 
page destroys that theory. Our Oliver was pure. But for the dedi- 
catory epistle to the great painter prefixed, and which is merely a 
screed of fulsome flattery, I could take an affidavit that u Low Life" 
was written by William Hogarth. And why not, granting even the 
fulsome dedication ? Hogarth could have more easily written this 
calendar of Town Life than the " Analysis of Beauty ;" and the sturdy 
grandiloquent little painter was vain enough to have employed some 
hack to write the prefatory epistle, if, in a work of satire, he had 
chosen to assume the anonymous. Perhaps, after all, the book was 
written by some clever, observant, deboshed man out of Grub Street, 
who had been wallowing in the weary London trough for years, and 
had eliminated at last some pearls which the other swine were too 
piggish to discern. There, however, is " Low Life." If you want to 
know what London was really like in 1759, you should study it by night 
and study it by day ; and then you may go with redoubled zest to your 
Fielding, Smollett, and Bichardson, as one, after a vigorous grind at 
his Greek verbs, may go to his Euripides, refreshed. From this thin 
little octavo I need not say I borrowed the notion of " Twice Bound 
the Clock." I chose a week-day instead of a Sunday, partly for the 
sake of variety, partly because Sunday in London has become so 
decorous as to be simply dull, and many of the hours would have been 
utterly devoid of interest. I brooded fitfully over the scheme for 
many months. At first I proposed to take my stand (in imagination) 
at King Charles's Statue, Charing Cross, and describe the Life re- 
volving round me during the twenty-four hours ; but I should have 
trenched upon sameness by confinement to singularity ; and I chose 
at last all London as the theme of description — 

" A mighty maze, but not without a plan." 

As a literary performance, this book must take its chance ; and I fear 
that the chance will not be a very favourable one. Flippant, preten- 
tious, superficial and yet arrogant of knowledge ; verbose without 
being eloquent ; crabbed without being quaint ; redundant without 



PREFACE. 



being copious in illustration ; full of paradoxes not extenuated by 
originality ; and of jocular expressions not relieved by humour — the 
style in which these pages are written, combines the worst character- 
istics of the comic writers who have been the " guides, philosophers 
and friends" of a whole school of quasi youthful authors in this era. 
I have reviewed too many would-be comic books in my time, not 
to be able to pounce on the unsuccessful attempts at humour in 
" Twice Round the Clock: " I have sufficient admiration and respect 
for the genuine models of literary vigour and elegance extant, not to feel 
occasionally disgusted with myself when I have found the most serious 
topics discussed with a grotesque grimace the while. It is a bad sign 
of the age — this turning of " cart-wheels" by the side of a hearse, 
this throwing of somersaults over grave-stones. The style we write in 
is popular now ; but a few years, I hope, will see a re-action, when a 
literary man must be either clown or undertaker, and grinning 
through a horse-collar will not be tolerated in the case of a mounte- 
bank otherwise attired in a shroud. Meanwhile, I cannot accuse 
myself of pandering to a depraved taste. I neither follow nor lead 
it. I cannot write otherwise than I do write. The leopard cannot 
change his spots. Born in England, I am neither by parentage nor 
education an Englishman ; and in my childhood I browsed on a salad 
of languages, which I would willingly exchange now for a plain 
English lettuce or potato. Better to feed on hips and haws than 
on gangrened green-gages and mouldy pine-apples. I read Sterne 
and Charles Lamb, Burton and Tom Brown, Scarron and Brantome, 
Boccaccio and Pigault-le-Brun, instead of Mrs. Barbauld, and the 
Stories from the Spelling-book. I was pitchforked into a French 
college before I had been through Pinnock in English : and I declare 
that to this day I do not know one rule out of five in Lindley 
Murray's grammar. I can spell decently, because I can draw ; and 
the power (not the knowledge) in spelling correctly is concurrent with 
the capacity for expressing the images before us more or less graphi- 
cally and symmetrically. It isn't how a word ought to be spelt : it is 
how it looks on paper, that decides the speller. I began to look upon 
the quaint side of things almost as soon as I could see things at all ; 
for I was alone and Blind for a long time in childhood. I had so 



Xll PREFACE. 

much to whimper about, poor miserable object, that I began to grin 
and chuckle at the things I saw, so soon as good Doctor Curee, the 
homoeopathist, gave me back my eyes. It is too late to mend now. 
While I am yet babbling, I feel that I have nearly said my say. This 
book, as a Book, will go, and be forgotten ; but it will, years 
hence, acquire comparative value when disinterred from the " two- 
penny-box " at a bookstall. Old Directories, Road Books, Court- 
Guides, Gazetteers, of half a century since, are worth something now. 
They are as the straw that enters into the composition of new bricks 
or books. Let us bide our time, then, my Augustus, humbly but 
cheerfully. You may have better fortune. You write novels and 
tales : and the chronicles of Love never die. But if in the year 
1959, some historian of the state of manners in England during the 
reign of Queen Victoria, points an allusion in a foot note by a 
reference to an old book called " Twice Round the Clock/' and which 
professes to be a series of essays on the manners and customs of the 
Londoners in 1859, that reference will be quite enough of reward for 
your friend. Macaulay quotes broadsides and Grub Street ballads. 
Carlyle does not disdain to put the obscurest of North German pamph- 
leteers into the witness-box ; albeit he often dismisses him with a 
cuff and a kick. At all events, we may be quoted some of these 
days, dear Gus, even if we are kicked into the bargain. 

GEOKGE AUGUSTUS SALA. 



CONTENTS. 



Four a.m.— Billingsgate Market .... 

Five a.m. — The Publication op the "Times" Newspaper 

slx a.m. — covent garden market . 

Seven a.m. — A Parliamentary Train 

Eight a.m. — St. James's Park — The Mall . 

Nine a.m.— The Clerks at the Bank, ant> the Boats on the Biter 

Ten a.m. — The Court op Queen's Bench, and the "Bench" itselp 

Eleven a.m. — Trooping the Guard, and a Marriage in High Lipe 

Noon — The Justice-Boom at the Mansion-House, and the "Bay Tree 

One p.m. — Dock London and Dining London 

Two p.m. — From Begent Street to High Change . 

Three p.m. — Debenham and Store's Auction-Booms, and the Pantheon 

Bazaar ,...,,, 
Four p.m. — Tatters all's, and the Park 
Five p.m. — The Fashionable Club, and the Prisoners' Yan 
Six p.m. — A Charity Dinner, and the Newspaper Window at the 

General Post-Oppice ...... 

Seven p.m. — A Theatrical G-reen-room, and " Behind the Scenes 
Eight p.m. — Her Majesty's Theatre, and a Pawnbroker's Shop 
Nine p.m.— Halp-Price in the New Cut, and a Dancing Academy 
Ten p.m. — A Discussion at the "Belvedere," and an Oratorio at 

Exeter Hall . ....'.. 



page 
9 

25 

37 

49 

65 

78 

88 

104 

116 

128 

142 

158 
186 

200 

218 
235 
251 

268 

284 



6 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Eleven p.m. — A Scientific Conversazione, and an Evening Party . 297 

Midnight — The Haymarket, and the Sub-Editor's Boom . . 317 

One a.m. — Evans's Supper-Rooms, and a Eire .... 330 

Two a.m. — A Late Debate in the House op Commons, and the Turn- 
stile of Waterloo Bridge ...... 357 

Hour the Twenty-fourth and Last — Three a.m. — A Bal Masque, and 

the Night Charges at Bow Street ..... 375 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, 



Portrait of the Author . . 

Four a.m. — Billingsgate Market : Carrying Fish Ashore 

Four a.m. — Billingsgate Market : The Fish Sold by Auction 

Ftve a.m. — Publication of the " Times : " Inside the Office 

Five a.m. — Publication of the " Times : " Outside the Office 

Six a.m. — Coyent Garden Market: The West End 

Six a.m. — Coyent Garden Market: Early Breakfast Stall 

Seyen a.m. — Parliamentary Train : Platform of the London and 

North-Western Railway 
Seyen a.m.— Parliamentary Train : Interior of a Third-Class Car- 
riage ...... 

Eight a.m. — St. James's Park .... 

Eight a.m. — Opening Shop .... 

Nine a.m. — Omnibuses at the Bank . 

Nine a.m. — Penny Steamboats Alongside the Pier at London Bridge 

Ten a.m. — Interior of the Court of Queen's Bench 

Ten a.m. — Interior of the Queen's Bench Prison 

Eleven a.m. — Trooping the Guard at St. James's Palace 

Eleven a.m. — A Wedding at St. James's Church, Piccadilly 

Noon — The Justice-room at the Mansion House . 

One p.m.— Dock-Labourers Returning to Work . 

One p.m. — Dining-rooms in Bucklersbury . 

Two p.m.— Regent Street 

Two p m. — High Change .... 



Frontispiece. 
Page 17 
20 
32 
33 
41 
44 



60 

64 

68 

76 

84 

85 

96 

97 

109 

113 

121 

137 

141 

148 

156 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Three p.m. — Debenham and Storr's Auction-rooms 
Three p.m. — The Pantheon Bazaar 
Four p.m. — Tatters all's 
Four p.m. — The Park 
Five p.m.— The Fashionable Club 
Five p.m. — The Prisoners' Yan 
Six p.m. — A Charity Dinner . 
Six p.m. — The Newspaper Window at the G-eneral Post- 
Seven p.m. — A Theatrical G-reen-room 
Seven p.m. — Behind the Scenes 
Eight p.m. — The Opera . 

Eight p.m. — Interior of a Pawnbroker's Shop 
Nine p.m. — House of Call for the Victoria Audience 
Nine p.m. — A Dancing Academy . 
Ten p.m. — A Discussion at the " Belvidere " 
Ten p.m. — An Oratorio at Exeter Hall 
Eleven p.m. — A Scientific Conversazione . 
Eleven p.m. — An Evening Party 
Midnight — Supper-rooms in the Haymarket 
Midnight — The Sub-Editor's Boom . 
One a.m. — Evans's Supper-rooms 
One a.m.— A Fire ..... 

Two a.m.— A Late Debate in the House of Commons 
Two p.m. — The Turnstile of Waterloo Bridge 
Three a.m. — A Bal Masque .... 
Three a.m.— The Night Charges at Bow Street . 



Office 



PAGE 

168 
177 
193 
197 
212 
216 
229 
233 
244 
249 
257 
265 
276 
281 
288 
296 
312 
316 
325 
329 
341 
349 
268 
273 
381 
392 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK; 

OH, THE 

HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT IN LONDON. 



FOUR O'CLOCK A.M.— BILLINGSGATE MARKET. 

Reader, were you ever up all night ? You may answer that you are 
neither a newspaper editor, a market gardener, a journeyman baker, 
the driver of the Liverpool night mail, Mrs. Gamp the sicknurse, the 
commander of the Calais packet, Professor Airey, Sir James South, 
nor a member of the House of Commons. It may be that you live at 
Clapham, that one of the golden rules of your domestic economy is 
"gruel at ten, bed at eleven," and that you consider keeping late hours 
to be an essentially immoral and wicked habit, — the immediate prelude 
to the career and the forerunner of the fate of the late George Barn- 
well. I am very sorry for your prejudices and your susceptibilities. I 
respect them, but I must do them violence. I intend that — Ion gre, 
mat gre — in spirit, if not in actual corporeality, you should stop out 
not only all night but all day with me ; in fact, for the space of twenty- 
four hours, it is my resolve to prohibit your going to bed at all. I 
wish you to see the monster London in the varied phases of its outer 
and inner life, at every hour of the day-season and the night-season ; 
I wish you to consider with me the giant sleeping and the giant wak- 
ing ; to watch him in his mad noonday rages, and in his sparse ma- 
ments of unquiet repose. You must travel Twice Round the Clock 
with me ; and together we will explore this London mystery to its 

B 



10 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

remotest recesses — its innermost arcana. To others the downy couch, 
the tasselled nightcap, the cushioned sofa, the luxurious ease of night- 
and-day rest. Ours be the staff and the sandalled shoon, the cord to 
gird up the lions, the palmer's wallet and cockle-shells. For, believe 
me, the pilgrimage will repay fatigue, and the shrine is rich in 
relics. 

Four o'clock in the morning. The deep bass voice of Paul's, the 
Staudigl of bells, has growlingly proclaimed the fact. Bow church 
confirms the information in a respectable baritone. St. Clement's 
Danes has sung forth acquiescence with the well-known chest-note of 
his tenor voice, sonorous and mellifluous as Tamberlik's. St. Marga- 
ret's, Westminster, murmurs a confession of the soft impeachment in 
a contralto rich as Alboni's in " Stridi la vampa ; " and all around and 
about the pert bells of the new churches, from evangelical Hackney to 
Puseyite Pimlico, echo the announcement in their shrill treble and 
soprani. 

Four o'clock in the morning. Greenwich awards it, — the Horse 
Guards allow it — Bennett, arbiter of chronometers and clocks that, 
with much striking, have grown blue in the face, has nothing to say 
against it. And that self-same hour shall never strike again this side 
the trumpet's sound. The hour itself being consigned to the inner- 
most pigeon-hole of the Dead Hour office — (a melancholy charnel- 
house of misspent time is that, my friend) — you" and I have close upon 
sixty minutes before us ere the grim old scythe-bearer, the saturnine 
child- eater, who marks the seconds and the minutes of which the infi- 
nite subdivision is a pulsation of eternity, will tell us that the term of 
another hour has come. That hour will be ^ve a.m., and at five it is 
high market at Billingsgate. To that great piscatorial Bourse we, an't 
please you, are bound. 

It is useless to disguise the fact that you, my shadowy, but not the 
less beloved companion, are about to keep very bad hours. Good to 
hear the chimes at midnight, as Justice Shallow and Falstaff oft did 
when they were students in Gray's Inn ; but four and five in the morn- 
ing ! these be small hours indeed : this is beating the town with a 
vengeance. Were it winter, our bedlessness would be indefensible ; 
but this is still sweet summer time. 

But why, the inquisitive may ask — the child-man who is for ever 
cutting up the bellows to discover the reservoir of the wind — why four 
o'clock a.m. ?] .Why not begin our pilgrimage at one a.m., and finish 
the first .half at midnight, in the orthodox get-up-and-go-to-bed man- 



FOUH CLOCK A.:tf. BILLINGSGATE MARKET. 11 

ner ? Simply because four a.m. is in reality the first hour of the work- 
ing London day. The giant is wide awake at midnight ; he sinks into 
a fitful slumber about two in the morning : short is his rest, for at four 
he is up again and at work, the busiest bee in the world's hive. 

The child of the Sun, the gorgeous golden peacock, strutting in a 
farmyard full of the Hours, his hens, now triumphs. It is summer ; 
and more than that, a lovely summer morning. The brown night has 
retired, and the meek-eyed moon, mother of dews, has disappeared : 
the young day pours in apace ; the mountains' misty tops are swelling 
on the sight, and brightening in the sun. It is the cool, the fragrant, 
and the silent hour, to meditation due and sacred song ; the air is 
coloured, the efflux divine turns hovels into palaces, and shoots with 
gold the rags of beggars. 

" The city now doth like a garment wear 

The beauty of the morning 

Kever did Sun more beautifully steep 
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or bill. 

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep. 
The River glideth at its own sweet will ; 

Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep. 
And all that mighty Heart is lying still."' 

I know that the acknowledgment of one's quotations or authori- 
ties is going out of fashion. Still, as I murmur the foregoing lines as 
I wander round about the Monument and in and out of Thames Street, 
waiting for Billingsgate-market time to begin, a conviction grows upon 
me that the poetry is not my own ; and in justice to the dead, as well 
as with a view of sparing the printer a flood of inverted commas, I may 
as well confess that I have been reading Mr. James Thomson and Mr. 
William Wordsworth on the subject of summer lately, and that very 
many of the flowery allusions to be found above, have been culled from 
the works of those pleasing writers. 

Non omnis moriar. Though the so oft-mentioned hours be asleep, 
aud the river glideth in peace, undisturbed by penny steamboats, the 
mighty heart of Thames Street is anything but still. The great ware- 
houses are closed, 'tis true ; the long wall of the Custom House is a huge 
dead wail, full of blind windows. The Coal Exchange (which edifice, 
with its gate down among the dead men in Thames Street, and its 
cupola, like a middle-sized bully, lifting its head to about the level of 
the base of that taller bully the Monument, is the neatest example of 
an architectural " getting up stairs" that I know)— the Coal Exchange 



12 TWICE EOTTND THE CLOCK. 

troubles not its head as yet about Stewarts or Lambtons, Sutherlands 
or Wallsend. The moist wharfs, teeming with tubs and crates of pot- 
ter's ware packed with fruity store, and often deliciously perfumed 
with the smell of oranges, bulging and almost bursting through their 
thin prison bars of wooden laths, are yet securely grated and barred up. 
The wharfingers are sleeping cosily far away. But there are shops and 
shops wide open, staringly open, defiantly open, with never a pane of 
glass in their fronts, but yawning with a jolly ha ! ha ! of open- win- 
dowedness on the bye-strollers. These are the shops to make you 
thirsty ; these are the shops to make your incandescent coppers hiss ; 
these are the shops devoted to the apotheosis and apodeiknensis (I 
quote Wordsworth again, but Christopher, not William) of Salt 
Fish— 

" Spend Herring first, save Salt Fish last, 
For Salt Fish is good when Lent is past." 

So old Tusser. What piles of salted fish salute the eye, and make the 
mouth water, in these open-breasted shops ! Dried herrings, real 
Yarmouth bloaters, kippered herrings, not forgetting the old original, 
unpretending red herring, the modest but savoury " soldier " of the 
chandler's- shop! What flaps of salt cod and cured fishes to me 
unknown, but which may be, for aught I know, the poll of ling which 
King James the First wished to give the enemy of mankind when he 
dined with him, together with the pig and the pipe of tobacco ; or it 
may be Coob or Haberdine ! What are Coob and Haberdine ? Tell 
me, Groves, tell me, Polonius, erst chamberlain and first fishmonger to 
the court of Denmark. Great creels and hampers are there too, full 
of mussels and periwinkles, and myriads of dried sprats and cured 
pilchards — shrunken, piscatorial anatomies, their once burnished green 
and yellow panoplies now blurred and tarnished. On the whole, each 
dried-fish shop is a most thirst-provoking emporium, and I cannot 
wonder much if the blue-aproned fishmongers occasionally sally forth 
from the midst of their fishy mummy pits and make short darts 
"round the corner 7 ' to certain houses of entertainment, kept open, it 
would seem, chiefly for their accommodation, and where the favourite 
morning beverage is, I am given to understand, gin mingled with milk. 
It is refreshing, however, to find that the fragrant berry of Mocha 
(more or less adequately represented by chicory, burnt horse-beans, 
and roasted corn) — that coffee, the nurse of Voltaire's wit, the inspirer 
of Balzac's brain ; coffee, which Madame cle Sevigne pertly predicted 



FOUR O'CLOCK A.M. — BILLIKGSGATE MAEKET. 13 

would "go out" with Racine, but which nevertheless has, with 
astonishing tenacity of vitality, " kept in" while the pert Sevigne and 
the meek Racine have quite gone out into the darkness of literary 
limbo — is in great request among the fishy men of Billingsgate. Huge, 
massive, blue and white earthenware mugs full of some brown decoc- 
tion, which to these not too exigent critics need but to steam, and to 
be sweet, to be the "coffee as in France," whose odoriferous u per- 
colations" the advertising tradesmen tell us of, are lifted in quick 
succession to the thirsty lips of the fishmen. Observe, too, that all 
market men drink and order their coffee by the " pint/' even as the 
scandal-loving old ladies of the last century (ladies don't love scandal 
now-a-days) drank their tea by the " dish." I can realise the con- 
tempt of a genuine Billingsgate marketeer for the little thimble-sized 
filagree cups with the bitter Mocha grouts at the bottom, which, with 
a suffocating Turkish chibouque, Turkish pachas and attar-of-roses 
dealers in the Bezesteen, offer as a mark of courtesy to a Frank tra- 
veller when they want to cheat him. 

Close adjacent is a narrow passage called Darkhouse Lane, and 
here properly should be a traditional Billingsgate tavern called the 
t4 Darkhouse." There is one, open all night, under the same designa- 
tion, in Newgate Market. Hither came another chronicler of " twice 
round the clock " with another neophyte, to show him the wonders of 
the town, one hundred and fifty years ago. Hither, when pursy, fubsy, 
good-natured Queen Anne reigned in England, and followed the 
hounds in Windsor's Park, driving two piebald ponies in a chaise, and 
touched children for the " evil," awing childish Sam Johnson with 
her black velvet and her diamonds, came jovial, brutal, vulgar, graphic 
Ned Ward, the " London Spy." Here, in the " Darkhouse," he saw 
a waterman knock down his wife with a stretcher, and subsequently 
witnessed the edifying spectacle of the recreant husband being tried 
for his offence by a jury of fishwomen. Scant mercy, but signal 
justice, got he from those fresh-water Minoses and Rhadamanthuses. 
Forthwith was he " cobbed " — a punishment invented by sleeveboard- 
wielding tailors, and which subsequently became very popular in her 
Majesty's navy. Here he saw " fat, motherly flatcaps, with fish- 
baskets hanging over their heads instead of riding-hoods," with silver 
rings on their thumbs, and pipes charged with " mundungus " in their 
mouths, sitting on inverted eel-baskets, and strewing the flowers of 
their exuberant eloquence over dashing young town rakes who had 
stumbled into Billingsgate to finish the night — disorderly blades in 



14 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

laced velvet coats, with torn ruffles, and silver-hilted swords, and 
plumed hats battered in scuffles with the watch. But the town-rakes 
kept comparatively civil tongues in their heads when they entered 
the precincts of the Darkhouse. An amazon of the market, other- 
wise known as a Billingsgate fish-fag, was more than a match for a 
Mohock. And here Ned Ward saw young city couples waiting for 
the tide to carry them in a tilt-boat to Gravesend ; and here he saw 
bargemen eating broiled red-herrings, and Welshmen "louscobby" 
(whatever that doubtless savoury dish may have been, but there must 
have been cheese in it) ; and here he heard the frightful roaring of 
the waters among the mechansim of the piers of old London Bridge. 
There are no waterworks there now ; the old bridge itself is gone ; 
the Mohocks are extinct ; and we go to Gravesend by the steamer, 
instead of the tilt-boat ; yet still, as I enter the market, a pleasant 
cataract of " chaff" between a flshwoman and a costermonger comes 
plashing down — even as Mr. Southey tells us that the waters come 
down at Lodore — upon my amused ears : and the conviction grows on 
me that the flowers of Billingsgate eloquence are evergreens. Mem. : 
To write a philosophical dissertation on the connection between 
markets and voluble vituperation which has existed in all countries 
and in all ages. 'Twas only from his immense mastery of Campanian 
slang that Menenius Agrippa obtained such influence over the Roman 
commons; and one of the gaudiest feathers in Daniel O'Connell's cap 
of eloquence was his having " slanged " an Irish market-woman down 
by calling her a crabbed old hypothenuse ! 

Billingsgate has been one of the watergates or ports of the city 
from time immemorial. Geoffrey of Monmouth's fabulous history of 
the spot acquaints us that " Belin, a king of the Britons, about four 
hundred years before Christ's nativity, built this gate and called it 
6 Belinsgate,' after his own calling;" and that when he was dead, his 
body being burnt, the ashes in a vessel of brass were set on a high 
pinnacle of stone over the said gate. Stowe very sensibly observes, 
that the name was most probably derived from some previous owner, 
" happily named Beling or Biling, as Somars' Key, Smart's Wharf, 
and others, thereby took the names of their owners." When he was 
engaged in collecting materials for his " Survey," Billingsgate was a 
" large Watergate port, or harborough for ships and boats commonly 
arriving there with fish, both fresh and salt, shellfish, salt, oranges, 
onions, and other fruits and roots, wheat, rye, and grain of divers sorts, 
for the service of the city, and the parts of this realm adjoining." 



FOUR CLOCK A.M. — BILLINGSGATE 1TAEKET. 15 

Queenhithe, anciently the more important watering-place, had yielded 
its pretensions to its rival. Each gives its name to one of the city wards. 

Some of the regulations concerning the " mystery" of the fish- 
mongers in old times are sufficiently interesting for a brief notice. 
In the reign of Edward I. the prices of fish were fixed — for the best 
soles, 3d. per dozen ; the best turbot, 6d. each ; the best pickled her- 
rings, Id. a score ; fresh oysters, 2d. a gallon ; the best eels, 2d. per 
quarter of a hundred, In a statute of Edward I. it w r as forbidden to 
offer for sale any fish except salt fish after the second day. In the 
city assize of fish the profits of the London fishmongers were fixed at 
one penny in twelve. They were not to sell their fish secretly, 
within doors, but in plain market-place. In 1320 a combination 
was formed against the fishmongers of Fish-wharf, to prevent them 
from selling by retail ; but Edward II. ordered the mayor and sheriffs 
to interfere, and the opposition was unsuccessful. The mayor issued 
his orders to these fishmongers of Bridge Street and Old Fish Street, 
to permit their brethren in the trade to "stand at stall;'' to mer- 
chandise with them, and freely obtain their share of merchandise, as 
was fit and just, and as the freedom of the city required. A few years 
later some of the fishmongers again attempted to establish a monopoly; 
but it was ordered that the " billestres," or poor persons who cried 
or sold fish in the streets, " provided they buy of free fishmongers, and 
do not keep a stall, or make a stay in the streets, shall not be hin- 
dered;" and also that persons and women coming from the uplands 
with fish caught by them or their servants in the waters of the Thames 
or other neighbouring streams, were to be allowed to frequent the 
market. With these exceptions, none but members of the Fishmon- 
gers' Company were to be allowed to sell fish in the city, lest the 
commodity should be made dear by persons dealing in it who were 
unskilful in the mystery. 

The old churches of London in the immediate vicinity of the fish- 
markets contained numerous monuments to fishmongers. That the 
stock-fishmongers, or dealers in dried or salted fish, should have 
formed so important a portion of the trade is deserving of notice, as 
a peculiarity of the times. Lovekin and Walworth, who both ac- 
quired wealth, were stock-fishmongers. The nature of the commo- 
dity was such as to render the dealers in it a superior class to the other 
fishmongers. A great store might be accumulated, and more capital 
was required than by the other fishmongers, who only purchased from 
hand to mouth. 



16 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

In 1699, an act was passed for making it a free market for the sale 
of fish — though the very commencement of the preamble alludes to Bil- 
lingsgate having been time out of mind a free market for all kinds of 
floating and salt fish, as also for all manner of floating and shell- 
fish. The necessity of a new act had arisen, as the preamble recites, 
from various abuses, one of which was that the fishmongers would 
not permit the street hawkers of fish to buy of the fishermen, by 
which means the fishmongers bought at their own prices. The extra- 
ordinary dream of making the country wealthy, and draining the 
ocean of its riches by means of fisheries, had for above a century 
been one of the fondest illusions of the English people ; and about 
the time that the act was passed, " ways to consume more fish" 
were once more attracting the popular attention. The price of fish 
at the time was said to be beyond the reach of the poor and even of 
the middling classes ; and for many days together the quantity re- 
ceived at Billingsgate was very inconsiderable. To remedy these 
evils, carriages were to be constructed, to be drawn by two post- 
horses, which were to convey the fish to market at a rate of speed 
which was then thought to be lightning rapidity. But though the 
project was much talked about, it never came to a head, and ultimately 
fell through, the projectors consoling themselves with the axiomatic 
reflection — that there are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it. 
But while I am rummaging among the dusty corners of my me- 
mory, and dragging forth worm-eaten old books to the light ; while I 
have suffered the hare of the minute-hand, and the tortoise of the 
hour-hand (the tortoise wins the race), to crawl or scamper at least 
half round the clock, Billingsgate Market itself— the modern — the 
renovated — a far different place to that uncleanly old batch of sheds 
and hovels, reeking with fishy smells, and more or less beset by ruf- 
fianly company, which was our only fish market twenty years ago — 
New Billingsgate, with a real fountain in the centre, which during the 
day plays real water, is now in full life and bustle and activity. Not 
so much in the market area itself, where porters are silently busied in 
clearing piles of baskets away, setting forms and stools in order, and 
otherwise preparing for the coming business of the fish auction, as 
on the wharf, in front of the tavern known to fame as Simpson's, 
and where the eighteenpenny fish ordinary is held twice every day, 
except Sunday, in each year of grace. This wharf is covered with 
fish, and the scaly things themselves are being landed, with prodigious 
celerity, and in quantities almost as prodigious, from vessels moored 



FOUR O'CLOCK A.M. BILLINGSGATE MARKET. 



17 




18 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

in triple tier before the market. Here are Dutch boats that bring eels, 
and boats from the north sea that bring lobsters, and boats from Har- 
tlepool, Whitstable, Harwich, Great Grimsby, and other English sea- 
ports and fishing stations. They are all called " boats," though many 
are of a size that would render the term ship, or at least vessel, far 
more applicable. They are mostly square and squat in rigging, and 
somewhat tubby in build, and have an unmistakeably fishy appearance. 
Communications are opened between the vessels, each other, and the 
shore, by means of planks placed from bulwark to bulwark ; and these 
bulwarks are now trodden by legions of porters carrying the fish 
ashore. Nautical terms are mingled with London street vernacular ; 
fresh mackerel competes in odour with pitch and tar; the tight strained 
rigging cuts in dark indigo-relief against the pale-blue sky ; the whole 
is a confusion, slightly dirty but eminently picturesque, of ropes, spars, 
baskets, oakum, tarpaulin, fish, canvas trousers, osier baskets, loud 
voices, tramping feet, and "perfumed gales," not exactly from "Araby 
the blest," but from the holds of the fishing- craft. 

Upon my word, the clock has struck five, and the great gong of 
Billingsgate booms forth market-time. Uprouse ye, then, my merry, 
merry fishmongers, for this is your opening day ! And the merry fish- 
mongers uprouse themselves with a vengeance. The only comparison 
I can find for the aspect, the sights, and sounds of the place, is— a 
Rush. A rush hither and thither at helter-skelter speed, apparently 
blindly, apparently without motive, but really with a business-like and 
engrossing pre-occupation, for fish and all things fishy. Baskets full 
of turbot, borne on the shoulders of the facchini of the place, skim 
through the air with such rapidity that you might take them to be 
flying fish. Out of the way ! here is an animated salmon leap. Stand 
on one side ! a shoal of fresh herrings will swallow you up else. There 
is a rush to the tribunes of the auctioneers ; forums surrounded by 
wooden forms — I mean no pun — laden with fish, and dominated by the 
rostra of the salesmen, who, with long account-books in their hands, 
which they use instead of hammers, knock down the lots with mar- 
vellous rapidity. An eager crowd of purchasers hedge in the scaly 
merchandise. They are substantial-looking, hearty, rosy-gilled men — 
for the sale of fish appears to make these merchants thrive in person 
as well as in purse. Why, though, should fishmongers have, as a 
body, small eyes ? Can there be any mysterious sympathy between 
them and the finny things they sell ? — and do they, like the husband 
and wife who loved each other so much, and lived together so long, 



FOUR CLOCK A.M. BILLIXGSGATE MARKET. 19 

that, although at first totally dissimilar in appearance, they grew at 
last to resemble one another feature for feature — become smaller and 
smaller-eyed as their acquaintance with the small- eyed fishes lengthens ? 
I throw this supposition out as a subject for speculation for some future 
Lavater. Among the buyers I notice one remarkable individual, un- 
pretending as to facial development, but whose costume presents a 
singular mixture of the equine and the piscine. Lo ! his hat is tall 
and shiny, even as the hat of a frequenter of Newmarket aficl an habitue 
of Aldridge's Repository, and his eminently sporting-looking neckcloth 
is fastened with a horse-shoe pin ; but then his sleeves are as the 
sleeves of a fishmonger, and his loins are girt with the orthodox blue 
apron appertaining, by a sort of masonic prescription, to his craft and 
mystery ! His nether man, as far as the spring of the calf, is clad in 
the galligaskins of an ordinary citizen ; but below the knee commence 
a pair of straight tight boots of undeniably sporting cut. Who is this 
marvellous compound of the fishy and " horsey " idiosyncrasies r Is he 
John Scott disguised as Izaak Walton ? is he Flatman or Chifney r 
Tell me, Mr. Chubb, proprietor of the "Golden Perch;" tell me, 
" Ruff," mythical author of the "Guide to the Turf" — for knowing 
not to which authority especially to appeal, I appeal to both, even as 
did the Roman maid- servant, who burnt one end of the candle to St. 
Catherine and the other to St. Nicholas (old St. Nicholas I mean, 
sometimes familiarised into "Nick"), in order to be on the safe side. 

There are eight auctioneers or fish salesmen attached to the market, 
and they meet every morning between four and five o'clock at one of 
the principal public-houses, to discuss the quantity and quality of fish 
about to be offered for sale. The three taverns are known as Bowler's, 
Bacon's, and Simpson's. The second of these is situated in the centre 
of the market, and is habitually used by the auctioneers, probably on 
account of the son of the proprietor being the largest consignee at 
Billingsgate. 

As the clock strikes five, the auctioneers disperse to their various 
boxes. Below each box are piled on " forms " or bulks the " doubles" 
of plaice, soles, haddock, whiting, and " offal." A " double " is an 
oblong basket tapering to the bottom, and containing from three to 
four dozen of fish ; " offal " means odd lots of different kinds of fish, 
mostly small and broken, but always fresh and wholesome. When 
the auctioneer is ready, a porter catches up a couple of "doubles," 
and swings one on to each shoulder, and then the bids begin. Soles 
have been sold as low as four shillings the " double," and have fetched 



20 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




FOUR O CLOCK A.M. — BILLINGSGATE MARKET. 21 

as high as three pounds. There is one traditional bid on record, 
which took place in the early part of the present century, of forty 
guineas per hundred for mackerel. Plaice ranges from one-and- six- 
pence to four shillings the double. The sale is conducted on the 
principle of what is termed a " Dutch auction," purchasers not being 
allowed to inspect the fish in the doubles before they bid. Offal is 
bought only by the "fryers." You may see, almost every market 
morning, a long, gaunt, greasy man, of that dubious age that you 
hesitate whether to call him youngish or oldish, with a signet ring on 
one little finger, and a staring crimson and yellow handkerchief round 
the collar of his not very clean checked shirt, buy from fifteen to 
twenty doubles of one kind or another ; and in the season the habitues of 
the market say that he will purchase from twenty-five to thirty bushels 
of periwinkles and whelks. This monumental " doubler," this Roths- 
child of the offal tribe, resides in Somers Town. To him resort to 
purchase stock those innumerable purveyors of fried fish who make 
our courts and bye-streets redolent with the oleaginous perfumes of 
their hissing cauldrons. For the convenience of small dealers, who 
cannot afford to buy an entire double, stands are erected at different 
parts of the market for " bumbarees." We may ask in vain, wide 
derivatur, for the meaning of the term, though it is probably of Dutch 
origin. Any one can be a bumbaree : it requires neither apprentice- 
ship, diploma, nor license, and it is the pons asinorum of the " mystery 
of fishmongers." The career is open to all; which, considering the 
difficulty of settling one's children in life, must be rather a gratifying 
reflection for parents. The process of bumbareeing is very simple. 
It consists in buying as largely as your means will afford of an auc- 
tioneer, hiring a stall for sixpence, and retailing the fish at a swinge- 
ing profit. I think that if I were not a landed gentleman, a Middlesex 
magistrate, and a member of the Court of Lieutenancy — vainly endea- 
vouring, meanwhile, to ascertain my parochial settlement, in order to 
obtain admission to a workhouse as an unable-bodied pauper — that I 
should like to be a bumbaree. 

Plaice, soles, haddocks (fresh), skate, maids, cod, and ling (the two 
last-mentioned fish in batches of threes and fours, with a string passed 
through the gills), are the only fish sold by auction. Fresh herrings 
are sold from the vessel by the long hundred (130). They are counted 
from the hold to the buyers in " warp " fives. Twopence per hun- 
dred is charged to bring them on shore. Eels are sold by the " draft" 
of twenty pounds weight — the price of the draft varying from three 



22 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

shillings to fifteen. Twopence per draft is paid for " shoreing " or 
landing the fish from the vessels. Sprats are sold on board the ships 
by the bushel. A " tindal" is a thousand bushels of sprats. When 
we come to consider the vast number of these oily, savoury little 
fishes that a bushel will contain, the idea of a " tindal " of them seems 
perfectly Garagantuan ; yet many "tindals" of them are sold every 
week during the winter season — for the consumption of sprats among 
the poorer classes is enormous. What says the Muse of the Bull at 
Somers Town — what sweet stanzas issue from the anthology of Seven 
Dials ?— 

" ! 'tis my delight on a Friday night, 
When sprats they isn't dear, 
To fry a couple of score or so 
Upon a fire clear. 

" They eats so well, they bears the bell 
From all the fish I knows : 
Then let us eat them while we can, 
Before the price is rose." 

(Chorus— ad libitum) " ! 'tis my delight," &c. 

The last two lines are replete with the poetry and philosophy of 
the poorer classes : " Let us eat them while we can, before the price 
is rose ;" for even sprats are sometimes luxuries unattainable by the 
humble. Exceedingly succulent sprats labour under the disadvantage 
of being slightly unwholesome. To quote Mr. Samuel Weller's anec- 
dote of the remark made by the young lady when remonstrating with 
the pastrycook who had sold her a pork pie which was all fat, sprats 
are "rayther too rich." And yet how delicious they are! I have 
had some passably good dinners in my time; I have partaken of 
tarbot a la creme at the Trois Freres Provencaux; I have eaten a filet 
a la Chateaubriand at Bignon's : yet I don't think there is a banquet 
in the whole repertory of Lucullus and Apicius — a more charming 
red-letter night in the calendar of gastronomy, than a sprat supper. 
You must have three pennyworth of sprats, a large tablecloth is indis- 
pensable for finger-wiping purposes — for he who would eat sprats 
with a knife and fork is unworthy the name of an epicure — and after 
the banquet I should recommend, for purely hygienic and antibilious 
reasons, the absorption of & petit verve of the best Hollands. 

To return. As regards salmon, nine-tenths of the aristocratic fish 
are brought up by rail in barrels, and in summer packed in ice. 
Salmon and salmon-trout are not subjected to the humiliation of being 



FOUR O'CLOCK A.M. BILLINGSGATE MARKET. 23 

" knocked down'* by an auctioneer. They are disposed of " by private 
contract" at so much per pound. 

Of dried and smoked fish of all kinds the best come from Yar- 
mouth ; but as regards the costermonger and street-vender — the 
modern " billestres," of dried haddocks, smoked sprats and herrings, 
entire or kippered — they are little affected by the state of the cured 
fish market so long as they can buy plenty of the fresh kind. The 
costermonger cures his fish himself in the following manner : — He 
builds a little shed like a watch-box, with wires across the upper part ; 
and on this grating he threads his fish. Then he makes a fire on the 
floor of his impromptu curing-house with coal or mahogany dust, and 
smokes the fish " till done,'' as the old cookery books say. There is 
a dealer in the market to whom all fish- sellers bring the skins of 
departed soles. He gives fourpence-halfpenny a pound for them. 
They are used for refining purposes. And now for a word concerning 
the Crustacea and the molluscs. Of oysters there are several kinds : 
Native Pearls, Jerseys, Old Barleys, and Commons. On board every 
oyster-boat a business-like gentleman is present, who takes care that 
every buyer of a bushel of oysters pays him fourpence. No buyer 
may carry his oysters ashore himself, be he ever so able and willing. 
There are regular a shoremen,*' who charge fourpence a bushel for 
their services ; so that whatever may be the market-price of oysters, 
the purchaser must pay, nolens volens, eightpence a bushel over and 
above the quoted rate. 

Of mussels there are three kinds : Dutch, Exeters, and Shorehams. 
They are brought to market in bags, of the average weight of three 
hundredweight ; each bag containing about one hundred and sixty 
quarts, inclusive of dirt and stones. They are sold at from five 
shillings to seven shillings a bag. Of periwinkles — or, as they are 
more popularly and familiarly termed, " winkles " — there are four sorts : 
Scotch, Clays, Isle of Wights, and Maidens. They are sold by the 
bushel, or by the " level" or gallon. Crabs are sold by the " kit" (a 
long shallow basket) and by the score. Lobsters by the score and the 
double. 

At the "Cock," in Love Lane, and at the "White Hart," in 
Botolph Lane, there is a boiling-house in the rear of the premises. 
Each boiling-house consists of a spacious kitchen filled with immense 
cauldrons. Here winkle and whelk buyers, who have neither utensils 
nor convenient premises sufficient to boil at home, can have it done 
for them for fourpence a bushel. Each boiling is performed separ- 



24 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

ately in a wicker-basket ; crabs and lobsters may likewise be boiled 
at these houses. Half-a-dozen scores of the fish are packed in a 
large basket, shaped like a strawberry-pottle, a lid is put between 
each lot, and the hot-water torture is inflicted at the rate of sixpence 
a score. 

If your servant, the writer, were not precluded by the terms of 
his contract from taking any natural rest, he might, pleading fatigue, 
retire to bed ; and, tossing on an unquiet couch, as men must do who 
slip between the sheets when the blessed sun is shining, have fan- 
tastic dreams of Ned Ward and Sir William Walworth : dream of the 
market-scene in " Masaniello," and hum a dream-reminiscence of 
" Behold, how brightly beams the morning!" which, of course, like 
all things appertaining to dreams, has no more resemblance to the 
original air than the tune the cow died of. Then fancy that he is a 
supernumerary in a pantomime, and that Mr. Flexmore, the clown, 
has jumped upon his shoulders, and is beating him about the ears 
with a " property " codfish. Then he might be Jonah, swallowed by 
the whale ; and then Tobit's fish. Then he would find himself half 
awake, and repeating some lines he remembered reading years ago, 
scrawled in ink on a huge placard outside the shop of Mr. Taylor, the 
famous fishmonger, in Lombard Street. Yes : they ran thus — 

" So the c Times ' takes an interest in the case of Geils ; 
I wish it would take some in my eels! " 

What a queer fish Mr. Taylor must have been ! Where is he now ? 
Why, he (your servant) is Taylor— Jeremy Taylor — Tom Taylor — 
Taylor the water-poet — Billy Taylor — the Three Tailors of Tooley 
Street — Mr. Toole, the toast-master of arts and buttered toast ; and — 
he is asleep ! 



TIYE O'CLOCK A.M. — PUBLICATION OF THE 



FIVE O'CLOCK A.M.— THE PUBLICATION OF THE 
"TIMES" NEWSPAPER. 

" There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter 
of the world — her couriers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her 
envoys walk into statesmen's cabinets. They are ubiquitous. Yonder Journal has an agent at 
this minute giving bribes at Madrid; and another inspecting the price of potatoes at Covent 
Garden." "Pexdexnis." 

If you have no objection to the statement of the fact, I would beg 
to observe that our present station on the clock face, twice round which 
we have to go, is now five in the morning ; and that at five a.m. the 
publication of the " Times " newspaper is, to use a north-country 
mining expression, in " full blast." You abhor the politics of the 
journal in question, you say : you consider the " Times " and 
" Evening Mail " to be the organ of a company, with limited liability, 
composed of the Emperor Alexander, Cardinal Wiseman, Baron 
Rothschild, Prince Aali Pacha, Metternich, Doctor Cumming, Baring 
Brothers, Lord Palmerston, Mr. Disraeli, Mr. W. J. Fox, and Miss 
Martineau. You are offended with the " Times " because the editor 
declined to insert that last six-paged letter from you against organ 
grinding. Never mind, you must come all the same to see the paper 
published. For the publication of the " Times" is a great, an 
enormous, a marvellous fact : none the less wonderful for being re- 
peated three hundred and thirteen times a-year. It is a pulsation of 
London's mighty heart, that should not be neglected. It is the daily 
booming of a tocsin, which, year after year, proclaims progress, and 
still progress to the nations ; which is the joy bell to the good, the 
passing bell to the bad, the world is blessed or cursed with ; which 
rings out ignorance and prejudice and superstition, and rings in know- 
ledge and enlightenment and truth. The " Times " is not alone in the 
possession of a peal of bells of this kind: and many daily, more 
weekly, papers ring out, loud and clear, to eager listeners ; were your 
vassal not one of the modestest of men, he would hint that for the last 
dozen years he has been agitating daily and weekly a little tintin- 
nabulum with what lustiness his nerveless arm will let him. But hard 
by St. Paul's, the cathedral of Anglicanism, is Printing House Square, 
the cathedral of Journalism, and in it hangs a bell to which Great 

c 



26 TWICE HOUXD THE CLOCK. 

Tom of Lincoln, Peter of York, the Kolokol of Moscow, and our own 
defunct "Big Ben," are but as tinkling muffineers. For though the 
sides of the bell are only paper, the clapper is the great public tongue ; 
the booming sound that fills the city every morning, and, to use the 
words of Mr. Walter Whitman, " utters its barbaric youp over the 
house-tops of creation," is the great Public Voice. Bottle up your 
animosities, then, stifle your prejudices, and come and hear the voice's 
first faint murmur at five o'clock in the morning. 

The office of the " Times n and " Evening Mail " is, as all civilised 
men should know, situated in Printing House Square and Playhouse 
Yard, in the parish of St. Ann's, Blackfriars, in the city of London. 
Now this is very pleasant and comfortable information, and is fit matter 
for a studious man to lay to heart ; and there exists but one little 
drawback to mar the felicity which one must naturally feel at having 
the style and title of the press's great champions' habitat so patly at 
one's fingers' ends. The drawback — the kink in the cable, the hyssop 
in the wine-cup, the thorn to the rose — is that, with the exception of 
Honey Lane market and Little Chester Street, Pimlico, Printing 
House Square is the most difficult locality to find in all London. It 
is not much use asking your way to it ; a map of London, however 
elaborate, would not be of the slightest assistance to you in discovering 
it : it will avail you little even to be told that it is close to Apothecaries' 
Hall, for where, I should like to know, is that huge musty caravan- 
serai of drugs, and who is to find it at a short notice ? And the inti- 
mation that Printing House Square is not far from Puddle Dock, 
would not, I opine, render you great service, intimate as might be 
your acquaintance with the shores of the river, both above and below 
bridge, and would be scarcely more lucid a direction than the intima- 
tion that the London terminus of the South- Western Railway was 
close to Pedlars' Acre. The " Times " newspaper is somewhere near 
all these places ; and it is likewise within a stone's throw from Lud- 
gate Hill, and not far from St. Paul's, and within a minute's walk of 
Fleet Street, and contiguous to Blackfriars Bridge, close handy to Earl 
Street, and no great distance from Chatham Place. Yet, for all this, 
the " Times " office might be, to the uninitiated, just as well placed in 
the centre of the Cretan labyrinth, or the maze at Hampton Court, or 
the budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The best way to reach 
the office is to take any turning to the south side of London Bridge, 
or the east of Bridge Street, Blackfriars, and then trust to chance. 
The probabilities are varied. Very likely you will find yourself 



FIVE CLOCK A.M. PUBLICATION OF THE " TIMES. 27 

entangled in a seemingly hopeless net-work of narrow streets ; you 
will be jostled into chandlers' shops, vilified by boys unctuous, black, 
and reeking from the printing-machine ; pursued by costermongers 
importuning you to purchase small parcels of vegetables ; and, par- 
ticularly after sundown, your life will be placed in jeopardy by a 
Hansom cab bouncing up or down the narrow thoroughfare, of course 
on its way to the " Times " office, and on an errand of life and death ; 
the excited politician inside, frantically offering the cabman (he, even, 
doesn't know the way to the " Times," and has just asked it of a 
grimy cynic, smoking a pipe in front of a coal and potato shed) extra 
shillings for speed. The grimy cynic, perhaps from sheer malevolence 
of disposition, perhaps from the ruffling of his temper naturally inci- 
dental to his being asked the same question about five hundred times 
every day, answers morosely that he believes the Hoffice is in Bum- 
mondsey, but he's blest if he knows hanything more about it. He 
will have bad times of it, that grimy cynic, I perpend, for telling such 
fibs. Still struggle on manfully, always like the nautical gentleman 
in the blue pilot jacket who had had so many domestic afflictions, 
and exhorted the passenger to " go down, go down." Nevermind 
the regiments of gallinacea that board in the gutter and lodge in 
the adjacent coal-cellars, and peck at your feet as though they could 
relish your corns. Never mind the infants of tender years w T ho come 
tumbling between your legs, sprawl, howling, at your feet, and cast 
around appealing glances, which draw cries of " shame !" from venge- 
ful family-men who have never set eyes on you before, but who evidently 
regard you as a peripatetic ogre, going about, of malice prepense, to 
trip up children. Never mind the suffocating odour of second-hand 
fish, vegetables, fruit, coal-dust, potato sacks, the adjacent gasworks, 
gum-benzoin, hartshorn, opium, and other medicaments from Apo- 
thecaries' Hall. Never mind the noises of dogs barking, of children 
that are smacked by their parents or guardians for crying, and then, 
of course, roar louder ; of boys yelling the insufferable w Old Dog 
Tray," the abominable " Keemo Kimo," the hideous " Hoomtoomdoo- 
dendoo/ 7 and rattling those abhorrent instruments of discord, the 
"bones;" of women scolding, quarrelling, or shrieking domestic 
calumnies of Mrs. Armstrong in connection with Bill Boosker, nick- 
named the "Lively Flea," from garret- windows across the street; of 
men growling, and wagon-wheels rumbling, and from distant forges 
the yell of the indignant anvil as the ruthless hammer smites it, and 
the great bar of iron is beaten flat, the sparks flying up, rejoicing in 



28 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

a red " ha-ha !" at the ferruginous defeat. Never mind the dangers 
of hoop, " hopscotch," " fly-the-garter," " thread-the-needle," "trip- 
the-baker," "tipcat," and "shove-halfpenny," for the carrying out of 
which exciting and amusing games the juvenile population entirely 
monopolise what spare strips of pavement there are. Trust on, be 
not afraid, keep struggling ; and it is five himdred to one that you 
will eventually turn up Printing House Square, over against the 
" Times" office. How ever the leviathan of the press manages to 
breathe in this close, stifling, elbow-hampering neighbourhood, has 
always puzzled me, and has puzzled, I daresay, a great many wiser 
than I. How do the archbishops in their coaches and six (it is well 
known that those gorgeous prelates write the leading articles, carrying 
the necessary stationery in their mitres, and wiping their pens on their 
black silk aprons- — the B — p of — x— cl, however, always writes with 
a pastoral crozier, dipped in milk and honey, or a lamb's fleece — and 
come down to the office at a quarter past nine every evening to correct 
their proofs) contrive to squeeze their broad-shouldered equipages 
through these bye-lanes ? How can the sub-editor's four-in-hand 
pass, the city correspondent's comfortable yellow chariot, nay, even 
the modest broughams of the compositors ? Why does not the 
"Times" burst forth from the shell it has grown too large for, and 
plant its standard on the hill of Ludgate, or by the side of Cheap, — 
if it must needs be in the city ? The area of Lincoln's Inn Fields 
would be perhaps the most suitable locality for a new office ; but it is 
indubitable that unless the "leading journal" retrogress and contract 
its operation, they will have, some day, to pull down the choking 
little nests of back- streets which surround and hem it in, even as they 
had to pull down the wall of the dock, bodily, in order to let the 
Great Britain steam-ship out. 

What a contrast sequestered Printing House Square, with its old- 
fashioned aspect, its quiet, dingy-looking houses, its clump of green 
trees within a railing to the left, presents to the gurgling, gasping 
neighbourhood which stands in such close propinquity to it ! Here is 
the great brainpan of journalism ; the centre of newspaper activity, 
the prefecture of police of the public press. Absolutely necessary is 
it that it should be entirely a secret police, the " awful, shadowy, 
irresponsible, and jet puissant we" should dominate over the columns 
of the daily journal. Will a time ever come, I wonder, when a man 
will sign his own articles in a newspaper ; receive his reward for 
honesty, his censure for tergiversation, from the public ? Will a 



FIVE O'CLOCK A.M. — PUBLICATION OF THE " TIMES." 29 

strange day of revolution ever arrive, when the mystic "we" shall be 
merged into the responsible, tax-paying, tangible, palpable, shootable, 
suicidable, and kickable "I?" Perhaps never ; perhaps such a con- 
summation would be disastrous. Old Cobbett, in one of his screeds of 
passionate contempt in his " gridiron" paper the " Register," once 
said that he should like to have all the newspaper editors and cor- 
respondents in London assembled in Hyde Park, in order that from 
their personal appearance the public might judge by what a disre- 
putable-looking set of fellows they were hoodwinked and nose-led. 
There would be no need to hold such a gathering in this scene-painting 
age. Walk but into any fashionable photographic studio, and you 
shall find all the " sommites" of the press neatly collectionised, and 
stuck on pasteboard in the show-room portfolio ; and if you entreat 
the photographer's pretty wife civilly, she will point out to you 
Doctor Copperbolt of the " Thunderer," and Bill Hornblower of the 
" Penny Trumpet," in their habit as they live. 

Printing House Square is to me interesting at all times of the day 
and night. In the afternoon, the dullest period of its existence, when 
the compositors are gone away, the editors not come, the last number 
of the last edition of the day's sheet printed, and the mighty steam- 
engine for a time hushed, I wander into its precincts often ; make 
some small pretexts of taking out a slip of paper, and wending my 
way towards the advertising department \ but soon retrace my steps, 
and, to tell the truth, moon about the square in such a suspicious and 
prowling manner, that if they kept any spoons on the premises, I should 
most probably be ordered off by the compositor on duty. This was 
Playhouse Yard too, once, was it — nay, is still ; but where is the old 
playhouse — the Globe Theatre, Blackfriars, if I mistake not ? Not a 
vestige, not a particle remains. The fourth estate has swallowed it 
all up. The Press Dragon of Wantley has devoured everything ; and 
the " Times" seem? omnipotent in its home by Puddle Dock. Look 
over the door of the advertisement office. Above that portal is a 
handsome marble slab, a votive tablet, in commemoration of a great 
victory the "Times" once gained, not a legal victory, but one of 
power and influence with the people, and especially with the com- 
mercial community, by its exposure, anent the trial of Bogle v. Lawson, 
of the most extensive and remarkable fraudulent conspiracy ever 
brought to light in the mercantile world. The "Times" refused to 
be reimbursed for the heavy costs with which its proprietors had been 
saddled in defending the action brought by Mr. Bogle, a banker at 



30 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

Florence, against the publisher of the " Times," Mr. Lawson. But 
a subscription, amounting to £2,700, had been raised, and this 
handsome sum, which the "Times" proprietors refused to accept, 
was at last laid out in the foundation of two scholarships at 
Christ's Hospital and the City of London School, for the benefit of 
pupils of those institutions proceeding to the universities of Oxford 
and Cambridge. Do you remember — are you old enough to re- 
member — the famous case of Bogle versus Lawson, reader ? It would 
take me five times the space I can spare for this paper to give you 
even the outline of the history of the monstrous fraud from which that 
action grew. Suffice it now to say, that Mr. Bogle had been mixed 
up — it has been since established innocently — in the great continental 
letter of credit forging system, invented, carried out, and pursued 
with consummate success by an accomplished scoundrel, the Marquis 
de Bourbel, who, when the felonious bubble at length burst, and the 
fraud was detected, was in nowise cast down or abashed by that dis- 
covery that had come, and the punishment that seemed imminent, but 
with admirable strategy called in his outlying pickets of countesses, 
actresses — demi-monde .adventuresses — couriers, and sham English 
milords, who had been scouring the Continent changing his forged 
letters of credit, and, after the unutterable impudence of an appear- 
ance in court during the "Times" trial, gracefully retired into 
private life. I, the scribe, moi qui vous parle, have lived in the same 
house with this great man. It was at a hairdresser's shop in the 
Regent's Quadrant, and in an upper chamber of the house in question 
did the gallant marquis, assisted by a distinguished countess, who had 
formerly danced on stilts, and an English copper-plate engraver, work 
off the proofs of his wicked paper money from the counterfeited 
plates. I should like to know what became eventually of the Marquis 
de Bourbel : whether his lordship was, in the ripeness of his time, 
guillotined, garotted, hanged, or knouted. I go for Siberia and the 
knout, for, from the peculiar conformation of his lordship's character, 
I don't think it possible that he could have refrained for long from 
forgery. We should have heard of him, I think, had he come to 
grief in Western Europe ; but Russian bank-notes are very easy to 
forge, and Russian prisons and prisoners are seldom brought before 
the public eye. They manage those little things better, and keep 
them nice and cozy and quiet ; and so I go for Siberia and the knout. 
It is, however, as the shades of evening gather round the Cour 
des Miracles which encompasses the "Times" office, that the scene 



±'IVE O CLOCK A.M. — PUBLICATION OP THE "TIMES. 31 

which it and the Square present becomes more interesting. For 
early in the evening that giant steam-engine begins to throb, and, as 
the hour advances, the monster is fed with reams on reams of stout 
white paper, which he devours as though they were so many wafers.*' 
It gets late at Printing House Square ; the sub-editors have been for 
some time in their rooms ; the ineffable mysteries of the " Times " — 
editors, proprietors, cabinet ministers, lord chancellors, generals of the 
Jesuits, for aught I know, have arrived from their clubs in broughams 
and in cabs. Who shall tell? That stout good-humoured looking 
gentleman with the umbrella and the ecclesiastical neckcloth, may be 
the writer of the comic leading articles, just arrived with his copy. 
No ; he has vainly tried the door of the advertisement office, which 
is closed. Perhaps he is only X. Y. Z., who, in the second column, 
entreats P. Q. R. to return to his disconsolate parents ; or the in- 
ventor of some new tooth-powder with a Greek name, or the dis- 
coverer of the " fourteen shilling trousers." It is getting later, and 
the windows of the great office are all blazing with gas. The steam- 
engine not only throbs ; it pants, it groans, it puffs, it snorts, it bursts 
into a wild, clanging psean of printing. Sub-editors are now hard at 
work cutting down "flimsy," ramming sheets of "copy" on files, 
endlessly conferring with perspiring foremen. Ineffable mysteries (I 
presume) are writing terribly slaughtering articles in carpeted rooms, 
by the light of Argand lamps. Do they have cake and wine, I 
wonder, in those rooms ? Sherry and sandwiches, perhaps, and on 
field-nights lobsters. It is getting later, but there is no sign of dimi- 
nution yet in the stream of cabs that drive into the Square. Every 
one who is in debt, and every one who is in difficulties, and everybody 
who fancies that he, or any friend, relation, or connection of his, has 
a grievance, and can put pen to paper, four letters together in ortho- 
graphy and four words in syntax, must needs write a letter to the 
"Times;" and of the metropolitan correspondents of that journal, the 
immense majority themselves bring their letters down to the office, 
thinking, haply, that they might meet the editor standing " promis- 
cuous " on the door-step, and after some ^.ye minutes' button-holding, 
secure, irrevocably, the insertion of their communications. I don't 
at all envy the gentleman whose duty it is to open and read (do they 
read them all ?) the letters addressed to the editor of the " Times." 

* A post-prandial paper, called the "Evening Mail," rarely seen in the metropolis, 
but extensively circulated in th.6 provinces, and especially in the colonies, and in * v 
United States, is published as a species of vesper thunderer at th£ " Tildes " office! 



32 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




FIVE CLOCK A.M. — PUBLICATION OF THE " TIMES. 



33 




34 TWICE EOTJ^D THE CLOCK. 

What quires of insane complaints, on matters running from the mis- 
delivery of a letter to the misgovernment of India, from the iniquities 
of the income-tax to an overcharge for a sandwich in a country inn, 
that editor must have to wade through ; what reams of silly compli- 
ments about " your influential journal," and " your world-known 
paper," he must have to read, and grin in his sleeve at! What a 
multitudinous army, w r hat a Persian host, these correspondents must 
be ! Who are they ? — the anonymous ones — wdiat are they like ? 
Who is "Verax?" who "Paterfamilias?" who " Indophiius ?" who 
" The London Scoundrel ?" who " A Thirsty Soul ?" When will Mr. 
Herbert Watkins photograph me a collection of portraits of " Con- 
stant Readers," " Englishmen," and "Hertfordshire Incumbents?" 
Where is the incumbency of that brilliant writer ? Who is " Habi- 
tans in Sicco" and how came he first to date from the " Broad Phy- 
lactery ?" and where does " Jacob Omnium " live when he is at 
home ? I should like to study the physiognomy of these inveterate 
letter writers ; to be acquainted with the circumstances which first 
led them to put pen to paper in correspondence with the " Times ;" 
to know how they like to see themselves in print, and also how they 
feel, when, as happens with lamentable frequency, their lucubrations 
don't get printed at all. 

It is getting later and later, oh ! anxious waiters for to-morrow's 
news. The " Times " has its secrets by this time. State secrets, 
literary secrets, secrets artistic and dramatic ; secrets of robbery, and 
fire, and murder — it holds them all fast now, admitting none to its 
confidence but the InefTables, the printers, and the ever-throbbing 
steam-engine ; but it will divulge its secrets to millions at five o'clock 
to-morrow morning. Later and later still. The last report from the 
late debate in the Commons has come in ; the last paragraph of in- 
teresting news, dropped into the box by a stealthy penny-a-liner, has 
been eliminated from a mass of flimsy on its probation, and for the 
most part rejected ; the foreign telegrams are in type ; the slaughter- 
ing leaders glare in their " chases," presaging woe and disaster to 
ministers to-morrow ; the last critic, in a white neckcloth, has hurried 
down with his column and a-half on the last new spectacle at the 
Princess's; or has, which very frequently happens, despatched that 
manuscript from the box at the "Albion," where he has been snugly 
supping, bidding the messenger hasten, and giving him to procure a 
cab the sum of one extra shilling, which that messenger never by any 
chance expends in vehicular conveyance, but runs instead with the 



FIVE CLOCK A.M. — PUBLICATION OF THE " TIMES. 35 

art-criticism, swift as the timid roe, so swift indeed, that policemen 
are only deterred through chronic laziness from pursuing and asking 
whether he hasn't been stealing anything. By this time the "Times'' 
has become tight and replete with matter, as one who has dined well 
and copiously. Nothing is wanting : city correspondence, sporting 
intelligence, markets, state of the weatheL*, prices of stocks and railway 
shares, parliamentary summary, law and police reports, mysterious ad- 
vertisements, and births, deaths, and marriages. Now let the nations 
wonder, and the conductors of the mangy little continental fly-sheets 
of newspapers hide their heads in shame, for the " Times " — the 
mighty "Times" — has "gone to bed." The "forms," or iron-framed and 
wedged-up masses of type, are, in other words, on the machine ; and, at 
the rate of twelve thousand an hour, the damp broad sheets roll from the 
grim iron instrument of the dissemination of light throughout the world. 
At five o'clock a.m., the first phase of the publication of the 
"Times" newspaper commences. In a large bare room — something 
like the receiving ward of an hospital — with a pay counter at one end, 
and lined throughout with parallel rows of bare deal tables, the " lead- 
ing journal " first sees the light of publicity. The tables are covered 
with huge piles of newspapers spread out the full size of the sheet. 
These are, with dazzling celerity, folded by legions of stout porters, and 
straightway carried to the door, where cabs, and carts, and light express 
phseton-like vehicles, are in readiness to convey them to the railway 
stations. The quantity of papers borne to the carriages outside by the 
stout porters seems, and truly is, prodigious ; but your astonishment 
will be increased when I tell you that this only forms the stock pur- 
chased every morning by those gigantic newsagents, Messrs. Smith 
and Son, of the Strand. As the largest consumers, the "Times" 
naturally allows them a priority of supply, and it is not for a consider- 
able period after they have received their orders that the great body 
of newsagents and newsvenders — the "trade," as they are generically 
termed — are admitted, grumbling intensely, to buy the number of 
quires or copies which they expect to sell or lend that day. The 
scene outside then becomes one of baffling noise and confusion. There 
is a cobweb of wheeled vehicles of all sorts, from a cab to a hybrid 
construction something between a wheelbarrow and a costermonger's 
shallow. There is much bawling and flinging, shoving, hoisting, pull- 
ing and dragging of parcels ; all the horses' heads seem to be turned 
the wrong way; everybody's off- wheel seems locked in somebody else's; 
but the proceedings on the whole are characterised by much good- 



36 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

humour and some fun. The mob of boys — all engaged in the news- 
trade — is something wonderful : fat boys, lean boys, sandy-haired 
and red-haired boys, tall boys and short boys, boys with red com- 
forters (though it is summer), and boys with sacks on their backs and 
money-bags in their hands ; boys with turn-down collars ; and boys 
whose extreme buttonedupness renders the fact of their having any 
shirts to put collars to, turn-down or stuck-up, grievously problema- 
tical. Hard-working boys are these juvenile Bashi-Bazouks of the 
newspaper trade. And I am glad to observe, for the edification 
of social economists, with scarcely an exception, very honest boys. 
I don't exactly say that they are trusted with untold gold, but of the 
gold that is told, to say nothing of the silver and copper, they give a 
generally entirely satisfactory account. At about half-past seven the 
cohorts of newsvenders, infantry and cavalry, gradually disperse, and 
the " Times " is left to the agonies of its second edition. 

As you walk away from Printing House Square in the cool of the 
morning, and reflect, I hope with salutary results, upon the busy scene 
you have witnessed, just bestow one thought, and mingle with it a 
large meed of admiration, for the man who, in his generation, truly 
made the "Times" what it is now — John Walter, of Bearwood, 
Member of Parliament. Foul-mouthed old Cobbett called him " Jack 
Walters," and him and his newspaper many ungenteel names, predict- 
ing that he should live to see him " earthed," and to " spit upon his 
grave ; " but he survived the vituperative old man's coarse epithets. 
He put flesh on the dry bones of an almost moribund newspaper. He, 
by untiring and indomitable energy and perseverance, raised the circu- 
lation of the " Times " twenty-fold, and put it in the way of attaining 
the gigantic publicity and popularity which it has now achieved. It 
is true that Mr. Walter realised a princely fortune by his connection 
with the " Times," and left to his son, the present Mr. John Walter, 
M.P., a lion's share in the magnificent inheritance he had created. 
But he did much solid good to others besides himself. This brave old 
pressman, who, when an express came in from Paris — the French 
king's speech to the Chambers in 1835 — and when there were neither 
contributors nor compositors to be found at hand, bravely took off his 
coat, and in his shirt-sleeves first translated, and then, taking " a turn 
at case," proceeded to set up in type his own manuscript. Mr. Walter 
was one of the pioneers of liberal knowledge; and men like him do 
more to clear the atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice, than whole 
colleges full of scholiasts and dialecticians. 



SIX O'CLOCK A.M. — COVENT GARDEN MAKKET. 37 



SIX O'CLOCK A.M.— COVENT GARDEN MARKET. 

An Emperor will always be called Caesar, and a dog " poor old 
fellow," in whatever country they may reign or bark, I suppose ; and 
I should be very much surprised if any men of Anglo-Saxon lineage, 
from this time forward to the millennium, could build a new city in any 
part of either hemisphere without a street or streets named after certain 
London localities, dear and familiar to us all. There is a Pall Mall in 
Liverpool, though but an unsavoury little thoroughfare, and a Picca- 
dilly in Manchester — a very murky, bricky street indeed, compared 
with that unequalled hill of London, skirted on one side by the 
mansions of the nobles, and on the other by the great green parks. 
Brighton has its Bond Street — mutatus ab ille, certainly, being a 
fourth-rate skimping little place, smelling of oyster-shells, sand, re- 
cently-washed linen, and babies. I question not but in far-off 
Melbourne and Sydney, and scarcely yet planned cities of the Bush, 
the dear old names are springing up, like shoots from famous trees. 
Antipodean legislators have a refreshment room they call " Bellamy's ;" 
merchants in far-off lands have their " Lloyd's ;" there are coffee- 
houses and taverns, thousands of miles away, christened " Joe's," and 
" Tom's," and " Sam's," though the original " Joe," the primeval 
" Tom," the first " Sam," most bald-headed and courteous of old port- 
wine-wise waiters, have long since slept the sleep of the just in quiet 
mouldy London graveyards, closed years ago by the Board of Health. 
On very many names, and names alone, we stamp esto perpetua ; and 
English hearts would ill brook the alteration of their favourite desig- 
nations. Long, long may it be, I hope, before the great Lord Mayor 
of London shall be called the Prefect of the Thames, or the Secretary 
of State for the Home Department be known as the Minister of the 
Interior ! 

Foremost among names familiar to British mouths is Covent 
Garden. The provincial knows it ; the American knows it ; Lord 
Macaulay's New Zealander will come to meditate among the moss- 
grown arcades, when he makes that celebrated sketching excursion 
we have so long been promised. To the play-goer Covent Garden is 
suggestive of the glories of Kemble and Siddons ; old book-a-bosom 
studious men, who live among musty volumes, remember that Harry 



3S TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

Fielding wrote the " Covent Garden Journal;" that Mr. Wycherley 
lived in Bow Street ; and that Mr. Dryden was cudgelled in Rose 
Street hard by. Politicians remember the fasti of the Westminster 
election, and how Mr. Sheridan, beset by bailiffs on the hustings, 
escaped through the churchyard. Artists know that Inigo Jones 
built that same church of St. Paul, in compliance with the mandate of 
his patron, the Earl of Bedford. " Build me a barn," said the Earl. 
Quoth Inigo, " My lord, I will build you the handsomest barn in 
England;" and the church is in the market to this day, with its barn- 
like roof, to see. Old stagers who have led jovial London lives, have 
yet chuckling memories of how in Covent Garden they were wont to 
hear the chimes at midnight in the days when they were eating their 
terms, and lay over against the " Windmill" in Moorflelds, and con- 
sorted with the Bona Robas. Those days, Sir John FalstafT — those 
days, Justice Shallow, shall return no more to you. There was the 
" Finish," — a vulgar, noisy place enough ; but stamped with undying 
gentility by the patronage of his late Royal Highness the Prince of 
Wales. Great George "finished" in Covent Garden purlieus; Major 
Hanger told his stories, Captain Morris sang his songs, there. In a 
peaceable gutter in front of the "Finish," Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 
Esq., M.P., lay down overtaken in foreign wines, and told the guar- 
dian of the night that his name was Wilberforce. A wild place, that 
"Finish;" yet a better one than Great George's other "Finish" at 
Windsor, with the actress to read plays to him, the servants anxious 
for him to quit the stage, that they might sell his frogged, furred coats, 
and white kid pantaloons : the sorry end in a mean chair — unfriended, 
unloved, save by hirelings deserted. When the Hope of England is 
old enough to wear on his fair head the coronal and the three ostrich 
feathers, will he patronise a "Finish?" shall we have another wild 
young Prince and Poms, I wonder. To be sure, Mr. Thackeray tells 
us that the young nobles of the present age have " Spratts" and the 
"back kitchen" to finish up a night in; but, pshaw! the Hope of 
England takes the chair at the Royal Institution to hear Mr. Faraday 
lecture, and sits on the bench beside John Lord Campbell to see 
rogues tried. 

Covent Garden is a very chain, and its links are pleasant remi- 
niscences. They are somewhat dangerous to me, for my business is 
not antiquarian, nor even topographical, just now ; and I have but to 
do with the sixth hour of the morning, and the vegetable market that 
is held in the monks' old garden. I will dismiss the noble house of 



SIX CLOCK A.M. — COYEST GAKDEN MARKET. 39 

Bedford, though Covent Garden, &c, are the richest appanage of that 
ducal entity — simply recording a wish that you or I, my friend, had 
one tithe of the fat revenues that ooze from between the bricks of the 
Bedford estate. You should not dig, nor I delve, then. We would 
drink brown ale, and pay the reckoning on the nail, and no man for 
debt should go to jail, that we could help, from Garryowen to glory. 
I will say nothing to you of the old theatre : how it was burnt again 
and again, and always re-appeared, with great success on the part of 
Phoenix. Of Bow Street, even, will I be silent, and proffer nought of 
Sir Richard Birnie, or that famed runner, Townsend. Nor of the 
Garrick Club, in King Street, will I discourse ; indeed, I don't know 
that I am qualified to say anything pertinent respecting that establish- 
ment. I am not a member of the club ; and I am afraid of the men 
in plush, who, albeit aristocratic, have yet a certain " Garrick " look 
about them, and must be, I surmise, the prosperous brothers of the 
"green-coats" who sweep and water the stage, and pick up Sir 
Anthony Absolute's hat and crutch in the play. And scant disserta- 
tions shall you have from me on those dim days of old, when Covent 
Garden was in verity the garden of a convent; when matins and 
vespers, complins and benedictions, were tinkled out in mellow tintin- 
nabulations through the leafy aisles of fruit trees ; when my Lord 
Abbot trod the green sward, stately, his signet-ring flashing in the 
evening sun ; and Brother Austin hated Friar Lawrence, and cursed 
him softly as he paced the gravel walks demurely, his hands in his 
brown sleeves, his eyes ever and anon cast up to count the peaches on 
the wall. Solemn old conventual days, with shrill-voiced choir-boys 
singing from breves and minims as big as latch-keys, scored in black 
and red on brave parchment music-tomes. Lazy old conventual days, 
when the cellarer brewed October that would give Messrs. Bass and 
Allsopp vertigo; when the poor were fed with a manchet and stoup at 
the gate, without seeking the relieving officer, or an order for the 
stoneyard. Comfortable old days, when the Abbot's venator brought 
in a fat buck from Sheen or Chertsey, the pis cater fresh salmon (the 
water-drops looked like pearls on their silvery backs). Comfortable 
old days of softly- saddled palfreys, venison pasties, and Malvoisie, san- 
dalled feet, and shaven crowns, bead-telling, and censor-swinging. 
These were the days of the lazy monks in their Covent Garden, 
Lazy ! They were lazy enough to illuminate the exquisitely beautiful 
missals and books of hours you may see in the British Museum ; to 
feed, and tend, and comfort the poor, and heal them when they were 



40 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

sick ; to keep art and learning from decay and death in a dark age ; to 
build cathedrals, whose smallest buttress shall make your children's 
children, Sir Charles Barry, blush ; but they were the lazy monks — so 
let us cry havoc upon them. They were shavelings. They didn't 
wash their feet, they aided and abetted Guy Fawkes, Ignatius Loyola, 
and the Cardinal Archbishop of 

It is six o'clock on a glorious summer's morning; the lazy monks 
fade away like the shadows of the night, and leave me in Covent 
Garden, and in high market. Every morning during the summer 
may be called market morning ; but in the winter the special morn- 
ings are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. It is a strange sight then 
in the winter blackness to see the gas glimmering among huge piles 
of vegetables hoisted high on carts, and slowly moving like Birnam 
Woods coming to a Dunsinane of marketdom. When the snow is on 
the ground, or when the rain it raineth, the glare of lights and black 
shadows ; the rushing figures of men with burdens ; the great heaving 
masses of baskets that are tumbled from steep heights ; the brilliantly- 
lighted shops in the grand arcade, where, winter or summer, glow the 
oranges and the hot-house fruits and flowers ; all these make up a 
series of pictures, strange and sometimes almost terrible. There are 
yawning cellars, that vomit green stuff; there are tall potato-sacks, 
propped up in dark corners, that might contain corpses of murdered 
men; there are wondrous masses of light and shade, and dazzling 
effects of candlelight, enough to make old Schkalken's ghost rise, 
crayon and sketch-book in hand, and the eidolon of Paul Eembrandt 
to take lodgings in the Piazza, over against the market. 

But six o'clock in the glorious summer time ! The London smoke 
is not out of bed yet, and indeed Covent Garden market would at all 
times seem to possess an exemption from over fumigation. If you 
consider the fronts of the houses, and the arches of the Piazza, you 
will see that though tinted by age, they have not that sooty grimness 
that degrades St. Paul's cathedral into the similitude of a temple 
dedicated to the worship of the goddess of chimney-sweepers^ and 
makes the East India House (what will they do with the India House 
when the directors are demolished?) look like the outside of the 
black-hole at Calcutta. Smoke has been merciful to Covent Garden 
market, and its cornucopia is not as dingy as a ramoneur's sack. All 
night long the heavily-laden wagons — mountains of cabbages, cauli- 
flowers, brocoli, asparagus, carrots, turnips, and seakale ; Egyptian 
pyramids of red-huddled baskets full of apples and pears, hecatombs 



S] - OliOCK A.M. — CGVENT GARDEN MARKET. 



41 




42 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

of cherries, holocausts of strawberry pottles, chair wicker bosoms 
crimsoned by sanguinolent spots ; and above all, piles, heaps — Pelions 
on Ossas, Atlases on Olympuses, Chimborazos on Himalayas, Mount 
Aboras on Mont Blancs — of Peas, have been creaking and rumbling 
and heavily wheezing along surburban roads, and through the main 
streets of the never-sleeping city. You heard those broad groaning 
wheels, perturbed man, as your head tossed uneasily on the pillow; 
and you thought of the bill that was to come due on the morrow. 
You too heard them, pretty maiden, in the laced night cap, as you 
bedewed that delicate border of dentelle with tears, coursing from 
the eyes which should have been closed in sleep two hours since, 
tears evoked by the atrocious behaviour of Edward (a monster and 
member of the Stock Exchange) towards Clara (a designing, wicked, 
artful thing, whose papa lives in Torrington Square) during the 
last deux temps. That dull heavy sound was distinct above the 
sharp rattle of the night cabmen's wheels ; the steady revolving 
clatter of the home-returning brougham : for the sound of wheels 
in London are as the waves of a sea that is never still. The 
policemen met the market wagons as they trudged along, and 
eyed them critically, as though a neat case of lurking about with 
intent to commit a felony might be concealed in a strawberry- 
pottle, or a drunk and incapable lying perdu in a pea-basket. Roar- 
ing blades, addicted to asserting in chorus that they would not 
go home till morning — a needless vaunt, for it was morning already 
— hailed the bluff-yisaged market carters, interchanged lively jocu- 
larities with them bearing on the syrup giving rhubarb and the 
succulent carrot, and lighted their pipes at the blackened calumets 
of the vegetarians. Young Tom Buffalo, who had been out at a 
christening party at Hammersmith, and had made the welkin ring 
(whatever and wherever the welkin may be, and howsoever the 
process of making it ring be effected) met a gigantic cabbage- 
chariot, as home returning, precisely at that part of Knightsbridge 
where Old Padlock House used to stand, and struck a bargain with 
the charioteer for conveyance to Charing Cross, for fourpence, a 
libation of milk, qualified by some spirituous admixture, and a 
pipeful of the best Bristol bird's-eye. And so from all outlying 
nursery-grounds and market-gardens about London : from Brompton, 
Fulham, Brentford, Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Kew ; from sober 
Hackney, and Dalston, and Kingsland, bank-clerk beloved; from 
Tottenham, and Edmonton, sacred to John Gilpin, his hat and wig : 



SIX O CLOCK A.M. — CQVENT GAIiDE^s MARKET. 43 

from saintly Clapham and Brixton, equally interested in piety, sugar- 
baking, and the funds, come, too heavy to gallop, too proud to trot, 
but sternly stalking in elephantine dignity of progression, the great 
carts bound to Coyent Garden. One would think that all the vege- 
table -dishes in the world would not be able to hold the cabbage, to 
say nothing of the other verdant esculents. 

Delude not yourself with the notion that the market- carts alon 
can bring, or the suburban market-gardens furnish, a sufficient quan- 
tity of green meat for the great, insatiable, hungry, ravenous monster 
that men call (and none know why) London. Stand here with me in 
Covent Garden market-place, and let your eyes follow whither my 
finger points. • Do you see those great vans, long, heavily-built, hoisted 
on high springs, and with immense wheels — vans drawn by horses 
of tremendous size and strength, but which, for all their bulk and 
weight, seem to move at a lightning pace compared with the snail 
crawl of the ancient market- carts ? Their drivers are robust men. 
fresh- coloured, full- whiskered, strong-limbed, clad in corduroy shining 
at the seams, with bulging pockets, from which peep blotting-paper, 
interleaved books of invoices, and parcels receipts. They are always 
wiping their hot foreheads with red cotton po eke t-hander chiefs. They 
are always in such a hurry. They never can wait. Alert in movement, 
strong in action, hardy in speech, curt and quick in reply, setting not 
much store by policemen, and bidding the wealthiest potatoe salesman 
" look sharp ;" these vigorous mortals discharge from their vans such 
a shower of vegetable missiles that you might almost fancy the bom- 
bardment of a new Sebastopol. " Troy," the old ballad tells us, " had 
a breed of stout bold men ; ;; but these seem stouter and bolder. And 
they drive away, these stalwart, bold- spoken varlets, standing erect in 
their huge vans, and adjuring, by the name of i; slow coach,'' seemingly 
immoveable market-carts to "mind their eye;" wearing out the 
London macadam with their fierce wheels, to the despair of the com- 
missioners of paving (though my private opinion is, that the paving 
commissioners like to see the paving worn out, in order that they 
may have the " street up ? ' again) : threading their way in a surpris- 
ingly dexterous though apparently reckless manner through the maze 
of vehicles, and finding themselves, in an astonishingly short space of 
time, in Tottenham Court Road, and Union Street, Borough. What 
gives these men their almost superhuman velocity, strength, confidence ? 
Tney do but carry cabbages, like other market-folk : but look on the 
legends inscribed on these vans, and the mystery is at once explained. 



44 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




SIX CLOCK A.M. — COTENT GARDEN MAPwKET. 4o 

" Chaplin and Home," " Pickford and Co/' railway carriers. These 
vegetable Titans are of the rail, and raily. They have brought their 
horns of plenty from the termini of the great iron roads. Carts and 
carts, trucks and trucks have journeyed through the dense night, laden 
with vegetable produce : locomotives have shrieked over Chatmoss, 
dragging cabbages and carrots after them : the most distant counties 
have poured the fatness of their lands at the feet of the Queen- city ; 
but she, like the daughter of the horse-leech, still cryeth, " Give ! 
give!" and, like Oliver Twist, "asks for more." So they send her 
more, even from strange countries beyond the sea. Black steamers 
from Rotterdam and Antwerp belch forth volumes of smoke at the 
Tower stairs, and discharge cargoes of peas and potatoes. The Queen- 
city is an hungered, and must be fed : and it is no joke, I need scarcely 
tell you, to feed London. When the King of Siam has resolved upon 
the ruin of a courtier, he makes him a present of a white elephant. 
As the animal is thrice sacred in Siamese eyes, the luckless baillee, or 
garnishee, or possessor of the brute, dare neither sell, kill, nor neglect 
it : and the daily ration of rice, hay, and sugar which the albino mon- 
ster devours, soon reduces the courtier to irremediable bankruptcy. 
Moral : avoid courts. If this were a despotic country, and her Majesty 
the Empress of Britain should take it into her head to ruin Baron 
Bothschilcl or the Marquis of Westminster (and indeed I have heard 
that the impoverished nobleman last mentioned is haunted by the fear 
of dying in a workhouse), I don't think she could more easily effect 
her purpose than by giving him Loxdox and bidding him feed it for 
a week. 

Very sweet is the smell of the green peas this summer morning : 
and very picturesque is it to see the market-women ranged in circles, 
and busily employed in shelling those delicious edibles. Some fas- 
tidious persons might perhaps object that the fingers of the shellers 
are somewhat coarse, and that the vessels into which the peas fall are 
rudely fashioned. What does it matter : If we took this fastidious- 
ness with us into an analysis of all the things we eat and drink, we 
should soon fill up the. measure of the title of Dr. Culverwell's book, 
by "avoiding" eating and drinking altogether. The delicate Ha- 
vannah cigar has been rolled between the hot palms of oleaginous 
niggers ; nay, some travellers declare, upon the bare thighs of sable 
wenches. The snowy lump-sugar has been refined by means of unut- 
terable nastinesses of a sanguineous nature ; the very daily bread we 
eat has, in a state of dough, formed the flooring for a vigorous polka. 



46 TWICE P0TJXD THE CLOCK. 

performed by journeymen bakers with bare feet. Food is a gift from 
heaven's free bounty : take Sancho Panza's advice, and don't look the 
gift-horse in the mouth. He may have false teeth. We ought to be 
very much obliged, of course, to those disinterested medical gentle- 
men who formed themselves into a sanitary commission, and analysing 
our dinners under a microscope, found that one-half was poison, and 
the other half rubbish ; but, for my part, I like anchovies to be red 
and pickles green, and I think that coffee without chicory in it is 
exceedingly nasty. As for the peas, I have so fond a love for those 
delicious pulse that I could partake of them even if I knew they had 
been shelled by Miss Julia Pastrana. I could eat the shucks ; I have 
eaten them indeed in Russia, where they stew pea- shells in a sweet 
sauce, and make them amazingly relishing. 

But sweeter even than the smell of the peas, and more delightful 
than the odour of the strawberries, is the delicious perfume of the 
innumerable flowers which crowd the north-western angle of the 
market, from the corner of King Street to the entrance of the grand 
avenue. These are not hot-house plants, not rare exotics ; such do 
not arrive so soon, and their aristocratic purchasers will not be out of 
bed for hours. These are simply hundreds upon hundreds of flower- 
pots, blooming with roses and geraniums, with pinks and lilacs, with 
heartsease and fuschias. There are long boxes full of mignionette 
and jessamine ; there are little pet vases full of peculiar roses with 
strange names ; there are rose-trees, roots and all, reft from the earth 
by some floral Milo who cared not for the rebound. The cut flowers, 
too, in every variety of dazzling hue, in every gradation of sweet odour, 
are here, jew r elling w r ooden boards, and making humble wicker-baskets 
irridiscent. The violets have w r hole rows of baskets to themselves. 
Who is it that calls the violet humble, modest ? He (I w T ill call him 
he) is nothing of the sort. He is as bold as brass. He comes the 
earliest and goes away the latest of all his lovely companions ; like a 
guest who is determined to make the most of a banquet. When the 
last rose of summer, tired of blooming alone, takes his hat and skulks 
home, the modest violet, w T ho has been under the table for a great part 
of the evening, wakes up, and calls for another bottle of dew — and the 
right sort. 

It seems early for so many persons to be abroad, not only to sell 
but to purchase flowers, yet there is no lack of buyers for the per- 
fumed stores which meet the eye, and well nigh impede the footsteps. 
Young sempstresses and milliner's girls, barmaids and shopwomen, 



SIX CLOCK A.M. — COYEST GARDEN MAKKET. 4? 

pent up all day in a hot and close atmosphere, have risen an hour or 
two earlier, and make a party of pleasure to come to Covent Garden 
market to buy flowers. It is one of heaven's mercies that the very 
poorest manage somehow to buy these treasures ; and he who is steeped 
to the lips in misery will have a morsel of mignionette in his window, 
or a bunch of violets in a cracked jug on his mantelshelf, even as the 
great lady has rich, savage, blooming plants in her conservatory, and 
camelias and magnolias in porphyry vases on marble slabs. It is a 
thin, a very thin, line that divides the independent poor from the 
pauper in his hideous whitewashed union ward : the power of buying 
flowers and of keeping a dog. How the halfpence are scraped together 
to procure the violets or mignionette, whence comes the coin that 
purchases the scrap of paunch, it puzzles me to say : but go where 
you will among the pauperum tabernas and you will find the dog and 
the flowers. Crowds more of purchasers are there yet around the 
violet baskets ; but these are buyers to sell again. Wretched-looking 
little buyers are they, half-starved Bedouin children, mostly Irish, in 
faded and tattered garments, with ragged hair and bare feet. They 
have tramped miles with their scanty stock-money laid up in a corner 
of their patched shawls, daring not to think of breakfast till their pur- 
chases be made ; and then they will tramp miles again through the cruel 
streets of London town, penetrating into courts and alleys where the 
sun never shines, peering into doorways, selling their wares to creatures 
almost as ragged and forlorn as themselves. They cry violets ! They 
cried violets in good Master Herrick's time. There are some worthy 
gentlemen, householders and ratepayers, who would put all such street- 
cries down by Act of Parliament. Indeed, it must an intolerable sin, 
this piping little voice of an eight-years old child, wheezing out a 
supplication to buy a ha'porth of violets. But then mouthy gentle- 
men are all Sir Oracles ; and where they are, no dogs must bark nor 
violets be cried. 

It is past six o'clock, and high 'Change in the market. What 
gabbling ! what shouting ! what rushing and pushing ! what confusion 
of tongues and men and horses and carts ! The roadway of the ad- 
jacent streets is littered with fragments of vegetables. You need pick 
your way with care and circumspection through the crowd, for it is 
by no means pleasant to be tripped up by a porter staggering under 
a load of baskets, that look like a Leaning Tower of Pisa. Bow 
Street is blocked up by a triple line of costermongers' "shallows,"' 
drawn by woe-begone donkies ; their masters are in the market pur- 



48 TWICE SOUND THE CLOCK. 

chasing that " sparrergrass " which they will so sonorously cry through- 
out the suburbs in the afternoon. They are also, I believe, to be put 
down by the worthy gentlemen who do not like noise. I wish they 
could put down, while they are about it, the chaffering of the money- 
changers in the temple, and the noise of the Pharisees' brushes as they 
whiten those sepulchres of theirs, and the clanging of the bells that 
summon men to thank Heaven that they are not " as that publican,*' 
and to burn their neighbour because he objects to shovel hats. King 
Street, Southampton Street, Russell Street, are full of carts and men. 
Early coffee- shops and taverns are gorged with customers, for the 
Covent Gardeners are essentially jolly gardeners, and besides, being 
stalwart men, are naturally hungry and a thirst after their nights" 
labour. There are public-houses in the market itself, where they give 
you hot shoulder of mutton for breakfast at seven o'clock in the 
morning! Hot coffee and gigantic piles of bread-and-butter dis- 
appear with astounding rapidity. Foaming tankards are quaffed, 
"nips" of alcohol "to keep the cold out*' (though it is May) are 
tossed off; and among the hale, hearty, fresh- coloured market-people, 
you may see, here and there, some tardy lingerer at " the halls of 
dazzling light," who has just crawled away from the enchanted scene, 
and, cooling his fevered throat with soda-water, or whipping up his 
jaded nerves with brandy and milk, fancies, because he is abroad at 
six o'clock in the morning, that he is " seeing life." Crouching and 
lurking about, too, for anything they can beg, or anything they can 
borrow, or, I am afraid, for anything they can steal, are some home- 
less, shirtless vagabonds, who have slept all night under baskets or 
tarpaulins in the market, and now prowl in and out of the coffee-shops 
and taverns, with red eyes and unshaven chins. I grieve to have to 
notice such unsightly blots upon the Arcadia I have endeavoured to 
depict ; but, alas ! these things are ! You have seen a caterpillar 
crawling on the fairest rose ; and this glorious summer sun must have 
spots on its face. There are worse on London's brow at six o'clock in 
the morning. 



SEYEX O CLOCK A.M. — A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN. 49 



SEVEN O'CLOCK A.M.— A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN. 

I know that the part which I have proposed to myself in these 
papers is that of a chronological Asmodeus ; you, reader, I have en- 
listed, nolens volens, to accompany me in my flights about town, at 
all hours of the day and night ; and you must, perforce, hold on by 
the skirts of my cloak as I wing my way from quarter to quarter of 
the immense city, to which the Madrid which the lame fiend showed 
his friend was but a nut-shell. And yet, when I look my self- 
appointed task in the face, I am astounded, humiliated, almost dis- 
heartened, by its magnitude. How can I hope to complete it within 
the compass of this book, within the time allotted for daily literary 
labour ? For work ever so hard as we penmen may, and rob ever so 
many hours from sleep as you may choose to compute — as we are 
forced to do sometimes — that you may have your pabulum of printed 
matter, more or less amusing and instructive, at breakfast time, or at 
afternoon club reading hour, we must yet eat, and drink, and sleep, 
and go into the world soliciting bread or favours, we must quarrel 
with our wives, if married, and look out the things for the wash, if 
single — all of which are operations requiring a certain expenditure of 
time. We must, we authors, even have time, an't please you, to grow 
ambitious, and to save money, stand for the borough, attend the board- 
room, and be appointed consuls-general to the Baratarian Islands. 
The old Grub Street tradition of the author is defunct. The man of 
letters is no longer supposed to write moral essays from Mount 
Scoundrel in the Fleet, to dine at twopenny ordinaries , and pass 
his leisure hours in night- cellars. Translators of Herodotus no 
longer lie three in a bed ; nor is the gentleman who is correcting 
the proof-sheets of the Sanscrit dictionary to be found in a hay-loft 
over a tripe shop in Little Britain, or to be heard of at the bar of 
the Green Dragon. Another, and as erroneous, an idea of the 
author has sprung up in the minds of burgesses. He wears, accord- 
ing to some wiseacres, a shawl dressing-gown, and lies all day on 
a sofa, puffing a perfumed narghile^ penning paragraphs in violet 
ink on cream-laid paper at intervals; or he is a lettered Intriguer, 
who merely courts the Muses as the shortest way to the Treasury 
bench, and writes May Fair novels or Delia Cruscan tragedies that 



50 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

he may the sooner become Prime Minister. There is another literary 
idea that may with greater reason become prevalent — that of the 
author-manufacturer, who produces such an amount of merchandise, 
takes it into the market, and sells it according to demand and the 
latest quotations, and the smoke of whose short cutty pipe, as he 
spins his literary yarn, is as natural a consequence of manufacture as 
the black cloud w r hich gusts from Mr. Billy roller's hundred- feet-high 
brick chimney as he spins his yarns for madapolams and "domestics." 
The author-manufacturer has to keep his books, to pay his men, to 
watch the course of the market, and to suit his w^ares to the prevail- 
ing caprice. And, like the cotton-spinner ; he sometimes goes into 
the a Gazette," paying but an infinitesimal dividend in the pound. 

Did I not struggle midway into a phrase, some page or so 
since, and did it not waltz away from me on the nimble feet of a 
parenthesis? I fear that such was the case. How can I hope, I 
reiterate, to give you anything like a complete picture of the doings 
in London while still the clock goes round ? I might take one house 
and unroof it, one street and unpave it, one man and disclose to you 
the secrets of twenty-four hours of his daily and nightly life ; but it 
is London, in its entirety, that I have presumed to " time" — forget- 
ting, oh ! egregrious and inconsistent ! — that every minute over which 
the clock hand passes is as the shake of the wrist applied to a 
kaleidoscope, and that the whole aspect of the city changes with 
as magical rapidity. 

I should be Briareus multiplied by ten thousand, and not Asmodeus 
at all, if I could set down in writing a tithe of London's sayings and 
doings, acts and deeds, seemings and aspects, at seven o'clock in the 
morning. Only consider. Drumming with your finger on a map of 
the metropolis ; just measure a few palms' lengths, say from Camber- 
well Gate to the "Mother Bedcap," on the one hand — from Limehouse 
Church to Kensington Gravel Pits, on the other. Take the cubic 
dimensions, my dear sir; think of the mean area; rub up those 
mathematics, for proficiency in w T hose more recondite branches you so 
narrowly escaped being second wrangler, twenty years since ; out with 
your logarithms, your conic sections, your fluxions, and calculate the 
thousands upon thousands of little dramas that must be taking place 
in London as the clock strikes seven. Let me glance at a few, as I 
travel with you towards that railway terminus wmich is our destina- 
tion. Camberwell Gate : tollbar-keeper, who has been up all night, 
going to bed, very cross ; tollbar-keepers wife gets up to mind the 



SEVEN CEOCK A.M. — A P A BXI AMENTA KY TEA1X. 51 

gate, also very cross. Woodendesk Grove, Grosvenor Park, Camber- 
well : Mr. Dockett, wharfage clerk in Messrs. Charter Party and Co.'s 
shipping house, Lower Thames Street, is shaving. He breakfasts at 
half-past seven, and has to be in the city by nine. Precisely at the 
same time that he is passing Mr. Mappin's razor over his commercial 
countenance, Mr. Flybynight, aged twenty-two, also a clerk, but at- 
tacked to the Lost-Monkey- ancl-Mislaid-Poodle-Department (Inland 
Revenue), Somerset House, lets himself into No. 7, Woodendesk 
Grove, next door to Mr. Dockett's, by means of a Chubb's key. Mr. 
Flybynight is in evening costume, considerably the worst for the con- 
cussion of pale ale bottle corks. On his elegant tie are the stains of the 
dressing of some lobster salad, and about half-a-pint of the crimson 
stream of life, formerly the joint property of Mr. Flybynight' s nose and 
of a cabman's upper lip, both injured during a " knock-down and drag- 
out" fight, supervening on the disputed question of the right of a pas- 
senger to carry a live turkey (purchased in Leadenhall market) with him 
in a hackney cab. Mr. Flybynight has been to two evening parties, a 
public ball (admission sixpence), where he created a great sensation 
among the ladies and gentlemen present, by appearing with a lady's 
cap on his head, a raw shoulder of mutton in one hand, and a pound 
of rushlights in the other ; and to two suppers — one of roasted po- 
tatoes in Whitechapel High Street, the second of scolloped oysters in 
the Haymarket. He paid a visit to the Vine Street station-house, 
too, to clear up a misunderstanding as to a bell which was rung by 
accident, and a policeman's hat which was knocked off by mistake. 
The inspector on duty was so charmed with Mr. Flybynight' s en- 
gaging demeanour and affable manners, that it was with difficulty 
that he was dissuaded from keeping him by him all night, and assign- 
ing him as a sleeping apartment a private parlour with a very strong 
lock, and remarkably well ventilated. He only consented to tear 
himself away from Mr. Flybynight's society on the undertaking that 
the latter would convey home his friend Mr. Keepitup, who, though 
he persistently repeated to all comers that he was " all right," ap- 
peared, if unsteadiness of gait and thickness of utterance were to be 
accepted as evidence, to be altogether wrong. Mr. Flybynight, 
faithful to his promise, took Mr. Keepitup (who was in the Customs) 
home ; at least he took him as far as he would go — his own doorstep, 
namely, on which somewhat frigid pedestal he sat, informing the 
" milk," a passing dustman, and a lady in pink, who had lost her 
way, and seemed to think that the best way to find it was to consult 



52 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

the pavement by falling prone thereupon every dozen yards or so — 
that though circumstances had compelled him to serve his country in 
a civil capacity, he was at heart and by predilection a soldier. In 
proof of which Mr. Keepitup struck his breast, volunteered a choice 
of martial airs, beginning with the " Death of Nelson, 9 ' and ending 
with a long howl, intermingled with passionate tears and ejaculations 
bearing reference to the infidelity of a certain Caroline, surname un- 
known, through whose cruelty he " would never be the same man 
again." Mr. Flybynight, safely arrived at Woodendesk Grove, after 
these varied peripatetics, is due at the Lost-Monkey-and-Mislaid- 
Poodle Office at ten ; but he will have a violent attack of lumbago 
this morning, which will unavoidably prevent him from reaching 
Somerset House before noon. His name will show somewhat un- 
favourably in the official book, and the Commissioners will look him 
up sharply, and shortly too, if he doesn't take care. Mr. Keepitup, 
who, however eccentric may have been his previous nocturnal va- 
garies, possesses the faculty of appearing at the Custom-house gates 
as the clock strikes the half-hour after nine, with a very large and 
stiff shirt-collar, a microscopically shaven face, and the most irre- 
proachable shirt, will go to work at his desk in the Long Room, with 
a steady hand and the countenance of a candidate for the Wesleyan 
ministry ; but Mr. Flybynight will require a good deal of soda-water 
and sal-volatile, and perhaps a little tincture of opium, before he is 
equal to the resumption of his arduous duties. Wild lads, these 
clerks ; and yet they don't do such a vast amount of harm, Flybynight 
and Keepitup ! They are very young ; they don't beat the town every 
night ; they are honest lads at bottom, and have a contempt for mean- 
ness and are not lost to shame. They have not grown so vicious as to 
be ashamed and remorseful without any good resulting therefrom ; and 
you will be astonished five years hence to see Keepitup high up in the 
Customs, and Flybynight married to a pretty girl, to whom he is the 
most exemplary of husbands. Let me edge in this little morsel of 
morality at seven o'clock in the morning. I know the virtue of steadi- 
ness, lectures, tracts, latch-key-prohibitions, strict parents, young 
men's Christian associations, serious tea-parties and electrifying ma- 
chines ; but I have seen the world in my time, and its ways. Youth 
will be youth, and youthful blood will run riot. There is no morality 
so false as that which ignores the existence of immorality. Let us 
keep on preaching to the prodigals, and point with grim menace to 
the draff and husks, and the fatted calf which never shall be theirs if 



SEVEN O'CLOCK A.M. — A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN. 53 

they do not reform ; let us thunder against their dissipation, their late 
hours, their vain "larks," their unseemly " sprees." It is our duty ; 
youth must be reproved, admonished, restrained by its elders. It has 
been so ever since the world began ; but do not let us in our own 
hearts think every wild young man is bound hopelessly to perdition. 
Some there are, indeed, (and they are in evil case,) who have come to 
irremediable grief, and must sit aloof — spirits fallen never to rise 
again — and watch the struggling souls. But it must rejoice even 
those callous ones to see how many pecks of wild oats are sown every 
day, and what goodly harvests of home virtues and domestic joys are 
reaped on all sides, from the most unpromising soil. Let us not 
despair of the tendencies of the age. Young men will be young men, 
but they should be taught and led with gentle and wise counsels, with 
forbearance and moderation, to abandon the follies of youth, and to 
become staid and decorous. Flybynight, with such counsels, and good 
examples from his elders — ah, ye seniors ! what examples are not due 
from you ! — will leave off sack and live cleanly like a gentleman ; and 
Keepitup will not bring his parents' gray hairs with sorrow to the 
grave. 

Seven o'clock in the morning ! I have already ventured a passing 
allusion to the " milk." The poor little children who sell violets and 
water-cresses debouch from the great thoroughfares, and ply their 
humble trade in by-streets full of private houses. The newsvenders' 
shops in the Strand, Holywell Street, and Fleet Street, are all in full 
activity. Legions of assistants crowd behind the broad counters, fold- 
ing the still damp sheets of the morning newspapers, and, with fingers 
moving in swift legerdemain, tell off " quires " and " dozens " of cheap 
periodicals. If it happen to be seven o'clock, and a Friday morning, 
not only the doors of the great newsvenders— such as Messrs. Smith 
and Son and Mr. Vickers — but the portals of all the newspaper offices, 
will be crowded with newsmen's carts and newsmen's trucks; and 
from the gaping gates themselves will issue hordes of newsmen and 
flying cohorts of newsboys— boys with parcels, boys with bags, boys 
with satchels, men staggering under the weight of great piles of 
printed paper. Mercy on us ! what a plethora of brain work is about, 
and what a poor criterion of its quality the quantity manifestlv 
affords ! Yon tiny urchin with the red comforter has but half-a- 
dozen copies tucked beneath his arm of a journal sparkling with 
wit, and radiant in learning, and scathing in its satire, and Titanic in 
its vigour ; yet, treading on his heels, comes a colossus in corduroy, 



Oi TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

eclipsed by a quadrangular mountain of closely-packed paper, quires 
— nay, whole reams — of some ragamuffin print, full of details of the 
last murder and abuse of some wise and good statesman because he 
happens to be a lord. 

Seven, still seven! Potboys, rubbing their eyes, take down the 
shutters of taverns in leading thoroughfares, and then fall to rubbing 
the pewter pots till they assume a transcendent sheen. Within, the 
young ladies who officiate in the bar, and who look very drowsy in 
their curl-papers and cotton-print dresses, are rubbing the pewter 
counters and the brass- work of the beer-engines, the funnels and the 
whisky noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogany, 
cutting up the pork pies which Mr. Watling's man has just left, dis- 
playing the Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal cano- 
pies. The early customers — matutinal habitues — drop in for small 
measures of cordials or glasses of peculiarly mild ale ; and the 
freshest news of last night's fire in Holborn, or last night's division 
in the House, or last night's opera at Her Majesty's, are fished up 
from the columns of the " Morning Advertiser." By intercommuni- 
cation with the early customers, who all have a paternal and re- 
spectful fondness for her, the barmaid becomes au courant with the 
news of the day. As a rule, the barmaid does not read the news- 
paper. On the second day of publication, she lends it to the dis- 
senting washerwoman or the radical tailor in the court round the 
corner, who send small children, whose heads scarcely reach to the 
top of the counter, for it. When it is returned, she cuts it up for 
tobacco screws and for curl papers. I like the barmaid, for she is 
often pretty, always civil, works about fourteen hours a day for her 
keep and from eighteen to twenty pounds a year, is frequently a kin- 
less orphan out of that admirable Licensed Victuallers' School, and is, 
in nine cases out of ten, as chaste as Diana. 

I should be grossly misleading you, were I to attempt to inculcate 
the supposition that at seven o'clock in the morning only the humbler 
classes, or those who have stopped up all night, are again up and 
doing. The Prime Minister is dressed, and poring over a savage 
leader in the " Times," denouncing his policy, sneering at his latest 
measure, and insulting him personally in a facetious manner. The 
noble officers told off for duty of her Majesty's regiment of Guards 
are up and fully equipped, though perchance they have spent the 
small hours in amusements not wholly dissimilar from those employed 
by the daring Fiybynight and the intrepid Keepitup to kill time, and 



SEVEX CLOCK A.M. — A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN. 55 

have devoted their vast energies to the absorbing requirements of 
morning parade. Many of the infant and juvenile scions of the aris- 
tocracy have left their downy couches ere this, and are undergoing a 
lavatory purgatory in the nursery. Many meek-faced, plainly- dressed 
young ladies, of native and foreign extraction, attached as governesses 
to the aristocratic families in question, are already in the school-room, 
sorting their pupils' copy-books, or preparing for the early repetition 
of the music lesson, which is drummed and thrummed over in the 
morning pending the arrival of Signor Papadaggi or Herr Hammerer, 
who comes for an hour and earns a guinea. The governess, Miss 
Grissell, does not work more than twelve hours a day, and she earns 
perhaps fifty guineas a year against Papadaggi' s fifteen hundred and 
Hammerer's two thousand. But then she is only a governess. Her 
life is somewhat hard, and lonely, and miserable, and might afford, to 
an ill-regulated mind, some cause for grumbling ; but it is her duty to 
be patient, and not to repine. What says the pleasing poet: 

" ! let us love our occupations, 
Bless the squire and his relations, 
Live upon our daily rations, 
And always know our proper stations."* 

Let us trust Miss Grissel knows her proper station, and is satisfied. 

Seven o'clock in the morning ; but there are more governesses, 
and governesses out of bed, than Miss Grissel and her companions in 
woe, in the mansions of the nobility. Doctor Wackerbarth's young 
gentlemen, from Towellem House, New Road, are gone to bathe at 
Peerless Pool, under escort of the writing-master. The Misses Gimps' 
establishment for young ladies, at Bays water, is already in full activity; 
and the eight and thirty boarders (among whom there are at present, 
and have been for the last ten years, two, and positively only two, 
vacancies. N.B. — The daughters of gentlemen only are received) — 
the eight and thirty boarders, in curl papers and brown Holland pina- 
fores, are floundering through sloughs of despond in the endeavour to 
convey, in the English language, the fact that Calypso was unable to 
console herself for the departure of Ulysses ; and into the French 
vernacular, the information that, in order to be disabused respecting 
the phantoms of hope and the whisperings of fancy, it is desirable to 
listen to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. In Charter- 
house and Merchant Taylors' and St. Paul's, the boys are already at 

* " The Chimes: ' 



,33 TWICE EOUO THE CLOCK. 

their lessons, and the cruel anger of Juno towards ^Eneas, together 
with the shameful conduct of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon, are mat- 
ters of public (though unwilling) discussion ; some private conversa- 
tions going on surreptitiously, meanwhile, touching the price of 
alleytaws as compared with agates, and the relative merits of almond- 
rock and candied horehound. After all, the poor have their privileges 
— their immunities ; and the couch of the rich is not altogether a bed 
of roses. Polly Rabbets, the charity girl, lies snugly in bed, while 
the honourable Clementina St. Maur is standing in the stocks, or is 
having her knuckles rapped for speaking English instead of French. 
Polly has a run in the Dials before breakfast, an expedition to buy a 
red herring for father, and perchance a penny for disbursement at the 
apple-stall. She is not wanted at school till nine. The most noble 
the Marquis of Millefleurs, aged ten, at Eton, has to rise at six ; he 
is fag to Tom Tucker, the army clothier's son. He has to clean his 
master's boots, fry bacon, and toast bread for his breakfast. If he 
doesn't know his lesson in school, the most noble the Marquis of 
Millefleurs is liable to be birched; but no such danger menaces 
Jemmy Allbones at the National, or Tommy Grimes at the Ragged 
School. If the schoolmaster were to beat them, their parents would 
have the plagosus Orhilius up at the police-court in a trice, and the 
Sunday newspapers would be full of details of the " atrocious cruelty 
of a schoolmaster." 

One more peep at seven o'clock doings, and we will move further 
afield. Though sundry are up and doing, the great mass of London 
is yet sleeping. Sleeps the cosy tradesman, sleeps the linendraper's 
shopman (till eight), sleeps the merchant, the dandy, the actor, the 
author, the petite maitresse. Hold fast while I wheel in my flight and 
hover over Pimlico. There is Millbank, where the boarders and 
lodgers, clad in hodden gray, with masks on their faces and numbers 
on their backs, have been up and stirring since six. And there, 
north-west of Millbank, is the palace, almost as ugly as the prison, 
where dwells the Great Governess of the Land. She is there, for you 
may see the standard floating in the morning breeze ; and at seven in 
the morning, she, too, is up and doing. If she were at Osborne she 
would be strolling very likely on the white-beached shore, listening 
to the sea murmuring " your gracious Majesty," and " your Majesty's 
ever faithful subject and servant," and "your petitioner will ever 
pray;" for it is thus doubtless that the obsequious sea has addressed 
sovereigns since Xerxes' time. Or if the Imperial Governess were at 



SEVEN CLOCK A.M. — A PAELIAMEKTAKY TRAIN. 57 

Windsor, she might, at this very time, be walking on those mysterious 
Slopes on which it is a standing marvel that Royalty can preserve its 
equilibrium. When I speak of our gracious lady being awake and up 
at seven o'clock, I know that I am venturing into the realms of pure 
supposition ; but remember I am Asmodeus, and can unroof palaces 
and hovels at will. Is it not, besides, a matter of public report that 
the Queen rises early : Does not the Court newsman (I wonder 
whether that occult functionary gets up early too) know it r Does 
not everybody know it — everybody say it? And what everybody says 
must be true. There are despatches to be read; private and confi- 
dential letters to foreign sovereigns to be written; the breakfasts, per- 
chance, of the little princes and princesses to be superintended ; the 
proofs, probably, of the last Royal etching or princely photograph to 
be inspected ; a new pony to be tried in the riding-house ; a new dog 
to be taught tricks : a host of things to do. Who shall say ? What 
do we know about the daily life of royalty, save that it must be in- 
finitely more laborious than that of a convict drudging through his 
penal servitude in Portland Prison ? I met the carriage of H.R.H. 
the Prince Consort, with H.R.H. inside it, prowling about Pedlar's 
Acre very early the other morning, going to or coming from, I pre- 
sume, the South- Western Railway Terminus. When I read of her 
Majesty's "arriving with her accustomed punctuality" at some ren- 
dezvous at nine o'clock in the morning, I can but think of and marvel 
at the amount of business she must have despatched before she entered 
her carriage. If there were to be (which heaven forfend !) a corona- 
tion to-morrow, the sovereign would be sure to arrive with his or her 
" accustomed punctuality ; " yet how many hours it must take to try 
on the crown, to study the proper sweep of the imperial purple, to 
learn by heart that coronation oath which is never, never broken ! 
For my part, I often wonder how kings and queens and emperors find 
time to go to bed at all. 

So now, reader, not wholly, I trust, unedified by the cursory view 
we have taken of Babylon the Great in its seven-o' clock-in- the-morn- 
ing phase, we have arrived at the end of our journey — to another 
stage thereof, at least. We have flown from Knightsbridge to Ber- 
mondsey, not exactly as the crow flies, nor yet as straight as an arrow 
from a Tartar's bow ; but still we have gyrated and skimmed and 
wheeled along somehow, even as a sparrow seeking knowledge on the 
housetops and corn in the street kennels. And now we will go out of 
town. 



58 TWICE KOUND THE CLOCK. 

Whithersoever you choose ; but by what means of conveyance 
By water ? The penny steamboats have not commenced their journeys 
yet. The Pride of the Thames is snugly moored at Essex Pier, and 
Waterman, No. 2, still keeps her head under her wing — or under her 
funnel, if you will. The omnibuses have not yet begun to roll in any 
perceptible numbers, and the few stage coaches that are still left (how 
they linger, those cheerful institutions, bidding yet a blithe defiance to 
the monopolising and all-devouring rail .!) have not put in an appear- 
ance at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, the Flower Pot in 
Bishopsgate Street, or the Catherine Wheel in the Borough. So we 
must needs quit Babylon by railway. Toss up for a terminus with me. 
Shall it be London Bridge, Briarean station with arms stretching to 
Brighton the w T ell -beloved, Gravesend the chalky and periwinkley, 
Rochester the martial, Chatham the naval, Hastings the saline, Dover 
the castellated, Tunbridge Wells the genteel, Margate the shrimpy, 
liamsgate the asinine, Canterbury the ecclesiastical, or Heme Bay the 
desolate ? Shall it be the Great Northern, hard by Battle Bridge and 
Pentonville's frowning bastille ? No ; the fens of Lincolnshire nor the 
moors of Yorkshire like me not. Shall it be the Great Western, w T ith 
its vast, quiet station, its Palladio-Vitruvian hotel, and its promise of 
travel through the rich meadows of Berkshire and by the sparkling 
waters of Isis, into smiling Somerset and blooming Devon ? No ; cab 
fares to Paddington are ruinously expensive, and I have prejudices 
against the broad gauge. Shall it be the Eastern Counties ? Avaunt ! 
evil-smelling Shoreditch, bad neighbourhood of worse melodramas, ' 
and cheap grocers' shops where there is sand in the sugar and birch- 
brooms in the tea. No Eastern Counties carriage shall bear me to the 
pestiferous marshes of Essex or the dismal flats of Norfolk. There is 
the South- Western. Hum ! The Hampton Court line is pleasant ; 
the Staines, Slough, and Windsor delicious ; but I fancy not the 
Waterloo Road on a fine morning. I am undecided. Toss up again. 
Heads for the Great Western ; tails for the London and North- 
western. Tails it is ; and abandoning our aerial flight, let us cast 
ourselves into yonder Hansom, and bid the driver drive like mad to 
Euston Square, else we shall miss the seven o'clock train. 

This Hansom is a most dissipated vehicle, and has evidently been 
up all night. One of its little silk window- curtains has been torn from 
its fastenings and flutters in irregular festoons on the inward wall. 
The cushions are powdered with cigar ashes ; there is a theatrical 
pass-check, and the thumb of a white kid glove, very dirty, lying at 



SEVEN CLOCK A.M. — A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN. 59 

the back. The long-legged horse with his ilLgroorued coat, all hairs 
on end like the fretful porcupine his quills, and his tail whisking with 
derisive defiance in the face of the fare, carries his head on one side, 
foams at the mouth, and is evidently a dissipated quadruped, guilty, I 
am afraid, of every vice except hypocrisy. Of the last, certainly, he 
cannot be accused, for he makes not the slightest secret of his pro- 
pensity for kicking, biting, gibbing, rearing, and plunging, a succes- 
sion of which gymnastic operations brings us, in an astonishingly 
brief space of time, to George Street, Euston Square ; where the cab- 
man, who looks like a livery- stable edition of Bon Caesar de Bazan, 
with a horse-cloth instead of a mantle, tosses the coin given him into 
the air, catches it again, informs me contemptuously that money will 
grow warm in my pocket if I keep it there so long, and suddenly 
espying the remote possibility of a fare in the extreme distance of the 
Hampstead Road, drives off — " tools" off, as he calls it — as though 
the Powers of Darkness, with Lucifer and Damagorgon at their head, 
were after him. 

I think the Euston Square Terminus is, for its purpose, the hand- 
somest building I have ever seen, and I have seen a few railway 
stations. There is nothing to compare to it in Paris, where the 
termini are garish, stuccoed, flimsy-looking structures, half booths 
and half barracks. Not Brussels, not Berlin, not Vienna, can show so 
stately a structure, for a railway station, bien entendu ; and it is only, 
perhaps, in St. Petersburg, which seems to have been built with a 
direct reference to the assumption of the Imperial crown at some 
future period by the King of Brobdignag, that a building can be 
found —the Moscow Railway Terminus, in fact — to equal in grandeur 
of appearance our columniated palace of the iron road. But the 
Russian station, like all else in that " Empire of Facades," is decep- 
tive : a magnificent delusion, a vast and splendid sham. Of seeming 
marble without it is ; within, but bad bricks and lath and plaster. 

Open sesame ! Let us pass the crowds of railway porters, who 
have not much to do just now, and are inclined to lounge about with 
their hands in their pockets, and to lean — in attitudes reminding the 
spectator of the Grecian statues clad in green velveteen, and with 
white letters on their collars — on their luggage trucks, for the pas- 
sengers by the seven o'clock train are not much addicted to arriving 
in cabs or carriages which require to be unloaded, and there are very 
few shilling or sixpenny gratuities to be earned by the porters, for the 
securing of a comfortable corner seat with your back to the engine, cr 



60 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK- 




SEVEN CLOCK A.M. A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN. 61 

that inestimable comfort, a place in a first-class carriage whose door 
the guard is good enough to keep locked, and in which you can make 
yourself quite at home with a bottle of sherry, some walnuts, and a 
quiet game at ecarte or vingt tin. The seven o'clock trainbands are 
not exactly of the class who drink sherry and play cards ; they are 
more given to selling walnuts than to eating them. They are, for the 
most part, hard-faced, hard-handed, poorly-clad creatures ; men in 
patched, time-worn garments : women in pinched bonnets and coarse 
shawls, carrying a plenitude of baskets and bundles, but very slightly 
troubled with trunks or portmanteaus. You might count a hundred 
heads and not one hat-box ; of two hundred crowding round the pay- 
place to purchase their third-class tickets for Manchester, or Liverpool, 
or even further north, you would have to look and look again, and 
perhaps vainly after all, for the possessor of a railway rug, or even an 
extra overcoat. Umbrellas, indeed, are somewhat plentiful ; but they 
are not the slim, aristocratic trifles with ivory handles and varnished 
covers — enchanter's wands to ward off the spells of St. S within, which 
moustached dandies daintily insert between the roof and the hat-straps 
of first-class carriages. Third-class umbrellas are dubious in colour, 
frequently patched, bulgy in the body, broken in the ribs, and much 
given to absence from the nozzle. Swarming about the pay-place, 
which their parents are anxiously investing, thirteen-and-foiu-pence or 
sixteen-and-ninepence in hand, are crowds of third-class children. I 
am constrained to acknowledge that the majority of these juvenile 
travellers cannot be called handsome children, well-dressed children, 
even tolerably good-looking children. Poor little wan faces you 
see here, overshadowed by mis-shapen caps, and bonnets nine bauble 
square ; poor little thin hands, feebly clutching the scant gowns of 
their mothers ; weazened little bodies, shrunken little limbs, distorted 
often by early hardship, by the penury which pounced on them — not 
in their cradles — they never had any — but in the baker's jacket in 
which they were wrapped when they were born, and which will keep 
by them, their only faithful friend, until they die, and are buried by 
the parish — poor ailing little children are these, and among them who 
shall tell how many hungry little bellies ! Ah ! judges of Amontillado 
sherry ; crushers of walnuts with silver nut- crackers ; connoisseurs 
who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow 
seal ; gay riders in padded chariots ; proud cavaliers of blood-horses, 
you don't know how painfully and slowly, almost agonisingly, the 
poor have to scrape, and save, and deny themselves the necessaries of 



62 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

life, to gather together the penny- a-miie fare. It is a long way to 
Liverpool, a long way to Manchester ; the only passengers by the 
seven o'clock train who can afford to treat the distance jauntily, are 
the Irish paupers, who are in process of being passed to their parish, 
and who will travel free. ! marvels of eleemosynary locomotion 
from Euston Square to Ballyragget or Carrighmadhioul ! 

But hark ! the train bell rings ; there is a rush, and a trampling 
of feet, and in a few seconds the vast hall is almost deserted. This 
spectacle has made me somewhat melancholy, and I think, after all, 
that I will patronise the nine o'clock express instead of the Par- 
liamentary Train. 

Let us follow the crowd of third-class passengers on to the vast 
platform. There the train awaits them, puffing, and snorting, and 
champing its adamantine bit, like some great iron horse of Troy 
suddenly gifted with life and power of locomotion. By the way, I 
wonder how that same wooden horse we are supposed to read about 
in Homer, but study far more frequently in the pages of Lempriere, 
or in the agreeable metrical romance of Mr. Alexander Pope, really 
effected its entrance into Ilium. Was it propelled on castors, on 
rollers, or on those humble wooden wheels that quickened the march 
of the toy horse of our nonage — the ligneous charger from Mr. Farley's 
shop in Fleet Street, painted bright cream-colour, with spots re- 
sembling red wafers stuck all over him, a perpendicular mane, and a 
bushy tail? Very few first or even second-class carriages are attached 
to the great morning train. The rare exceptions seem to be placed 
there more as a graceful concession to the gentilities, or the respect- 
abilities, or the u gigabilities," as Mr. Carlyle would call them, than 
with any reference to their real utility in a journey to the north. 
Who, indeed, among the bustling Anglo-Saxons, almost breathless in 
their eagerness to travel the longest possible distance in the shortest 
possible time, would care to pay first-class fare for a trip to Man- 
chester, which consumes ten mortal hours, when, by the space-scorning 
express, the distance may be accomplished, at a not unreasonable 
augmentation of fare, in something like five hours ? So the roomy 
six-seated chariots, with their arm-rests and head-rests, are well nigh 
abandoned ; and the wooden boxes, which appear to have been 
specially designed by railway directors to teach second-class travellers, 
who can afford to pay more than third-class fare, that they had much 
better pay first-class, and go the entire animal (which, indeed, seeing 
how abominable are our second-class carriages in England, is a far 



SEVEN O'CLOCK A.M. — A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN. 63 

preferable proceeding), are not much better tenanted. Some misan- 
thropic men, in Welsh wigs and fur caps with flaps turned down over 
the ears, peer at us as we pass, pull up the window-frames captiously, 
as though they suspected us of a design to intrude on their solitude, 
and, watch in hand s call out in hoarse voices to the guard to warn him 
it is time the train had started. What is the use of being in a hurry, 
gentlemen? you will have plenty of breathing-time at Tring, and 
Watford, and Weedon, and some five-and-twenty other stations, be- 
sides opportunities for observing the beauties of nature at remote 
localities, where you will be quietly shunted off on to a siding to allow 
the express to pass you by. 

But what a contrast to the quietude of the scarcely-patronised 
first and second-class ivagons are the great hearse-like caravans in 
which travel the teeming hundreds who can afford to pay but a penny 
a mile ! Enter one of these human menageries where the occupants 
are stowed away with little more courtesy or regard to their comfort 
than might be exemplified by the master of the ceremonies of one of 
Mr. Womb well's vans. What a hurly-burly ; what a seething mass ; 
what a scrambling for places ; what a shrill turmoil of women's voices 
and children's wailings, relieved, as in the Gospodin Pomilaiou (the 
Kyrie Eieison of the Russian churches), by the deep bass voices of 
gruff men ! What a motley assemblage of men, women, and children, 
belonging to callings multifariously varied, yet all marked with the 
homogeneous penny-a-mile stamp of poverty ! Sailors with bronzed 
faces and tarry hands, and those marvellous tarpaulin pancake hats, 
stuck, in defiance of all the laws of gravity, at the back of their 
heads ; squat, squarely-built fellows, using strange and occasionally 
not very polite language, much given to "skylarking" with one an- 
other, but full of a simple, manly courtesy to all the females, and 
marvellously kind to the babies and little children ; gaunt American 
sailors in red worsted shirts, with case-knives suspended to their 
belts, taciturn men expectorating freely, and when they do condescend 
to address themselves to speech, using the most astounding combi- 
nation of adjective adjurations, relating chiefly to their limbs and 
their organs of vision ; railway navvies going to work at some 
place down the line, and obligingly franked thither for that purpose 
by the company ; pretty servant-maids going to see their relatives ; 
Jew pedlars ; Irish labourers in swarms ; soldiers on furlough, with the 
breast of their scarlet coatees open, and disclosing beneath linen of 
an elaborate coarseness of texture — one might fancy so many military 



64 



TWICE ROUKB THE CLOCK. 




EIGHT CLOCK A.M. — SAINT JAMES S PAKK — THE MALL. 65 

penitents wearing hair tunics ; other soldiers in full uniform, "with 
their knapsacks laid across their knees, and their muskets — prudently 
divested of the transfixing bayonets — which the old women in the 
carriage are marvellously afraid will " go off/' disposed beside them, 
proceeding to Weedon barracks under the command of a staid Scotch 
corporal, who reads a tract, " Grace for Grenadiers" or " Powder and 
Piety," and takes snuff: journeymen mechanics with their tool-baskets ; 
charwomen, servants out of place, stablemen, bricklayers' labourers, 
and shopboys. 

Ay, and there are, I am afraid, not a few bad characters among 
the crowd : certain dubiously-attired, flash-looking, ragged dan- 
dies, with cheap pins in their foul cravats, and long greasy hair 
floating over their coat-collars, impress me most unfavourably, and 
dispose me to augur ill for the benefit which Manchester or Liverpool 
may derive from their visit ; and of the moral status of yonder low- 
browed, bull-necked, villanous-looking gentleman, who has taken a 
seat in a remote corner, between two stern guardians, and who, strive 
as he may to pull his coat-cuffs over his wrists, cannot conceal the 
presence of a pair of neat shining handcuffs, there cannot, I perpend, 
exist any reasonable doubt. But we must take the evil with the 
good : and we cannot expect perfection, not even in a Parliamentary 
Train. 



EIGHT O'CLOCK A.M.— ST. JAMES'S PARK— THE MALL. 

Of the great army of sightseers, there are few but have paid a 
visit to Portsmouth, and, under the guidance of a mahogany-faced 
man in a pea-jacket, who has invariably served in his youth as cox- 
swain to Admiral Lord Xelson, K.C.B., have perambulated from stem 
to stern, from quarterdeck to kelson, that famous ship from whose 
signal halyards flew out, fifty-three years since, the immortal watch- 
word " England expects every man to do his duty," in Trafalgar Bay. 
We are (or rather were, till the epoch of the late passport regulations 
and the war), an ambitious army of sightseers in this year of question- 
able grace, '59: and nothing less would serve us then for an autumn 



66 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

trip than a picnic in the Street of Tombs at Pompeii, a moonlight 
polka among the rank docks and charlocks and slimy reptiles of the 
Iloman Colosseum, a yacht voyage up the gulf of Bothnia, or a four 
clays' jolting in a telega from Moscow to the fair of Nishni-Novgorod. 
But in the days of yore, when this old hat was new, and Manlius was 
consul, and the eleven hours' route to the Continent existed not, we 
went a-gipsying in a less ostentatious manner. The Lions in the 
Tower, the Horns at Highgate, the Spaniards at Hampstead, the 
Wandering Minstrel at Beulah Spa ; and on highdays and holidays a 
stage-coach and pleasure-boat journey to Portsmouth, Southampton, 
Netley Abbey, Carisbrook Castle, and the UnderclifF ; these filled up 
the simple measure of our pleasure-gadding. We are improved now- 
a-days, and go the grand tour like my lord ; and are wiser, and better, 
and happier — of course. 

When in the noble harbour of Portsmouth you have taken your 
wife, your sweetheart, or your friend the intelligent foreigner, to 
w r horn you wish to show T the glories of England, and when the 
cicerone of the great war-ship has told his parrot-tale about admirals' 
quarter-galleries and officers' gun-rooms ; when at last he has taken 
you into the cabin, and at the back shown you the sorrowful inscrip- 
tion painted on the stanchion, 4i Hebe Nelson Died !" did never a 
sudden desire come across you to be left alone — to have the army of 
sight- seers banished five hundred miles away — to be allowed to remain 
there in the silent cabin among the shadows, to muse on the memory 
of the great dead, to conjure up mind-pictures of that closing scene : 
the cannon booming overhead ; the terrified surgeons w T ith outspread 
bandages, and probes, and knives, knowing that their skill was of no 
avail ; the burly shipmen crying like little children ; and alone tranquil 
and serene among that sorrowful group, peaceful as an infant in its 
cradle, the Admiral, his stars and ribbons gleaming in the lantern's 
fitful rays, but never with so strong a light as the gory ghastliness of 
his death wound ; the brave yellow-haired Admiral, with the puny 
limbs and giant's heart, waiting to die, ready to die, happy to die, 
thanking God that he had done his duty to his king, and meekly 
saying, " Kiss me, Hardy." 

That inscription in the Victory s cabin has been to me the source 
of meditation frequent and infinitely pleasant. I love to think, 
walking in historical streets and houses, that my feet are treading 
over spots where men for ever famous have left an imprint of glory. 
I peer into the soil, the stones, the planks, to descry the shadowy 



EIGHT CLOCK AM. — ST. JOES S PAUK — THE MALE. 67 

mark of Hercules' foot, of the iron -plated sole of the warrior, the 
sandalled shoon of the saint, the dainty heel of the brocaded slipper 
of beauty. Every place that history or tradition has made her own 
is to me a field, not of forty, but of forty thousand footsteps ; and I 
please myself sometimes with futile wishes that the boundaries of 
these footsteps might have been marked by plates of brass and 
adamant, as Nelson's death-place is marked on board his flagship. It 
were better, perhaps, to leave the exact spot to imagination ; for 
though I would give something to know the very window of the 
Banqueting House from whence Charles Stuart came out to his 
death, and the precise spot where he turned to Juxon and uttered his 
mysterious injunction " Remember !" I would not care to know the 
particular branch of the tree to which Judas affixed his thrice-earned 
halter when he hanged himself : I could spare Mr. Dix the trouble 
of telling me the identical spot on the tavern table on which the 
coroner laid his three-cornered hat when he held his inquest on the 
worthless impostor Chatterton — -a " marvellous boy" if you will, but 
one who perished in his miserable folly and forgery — and I could 
well exempt the legitimacy-bemused courtiers of Louis XYIII. from 
perpetuating, as they did in brass, the few inches of soil at Calais 
first pressed on his return to France by the foot of that gross fat 
man. 

There are two cities in the world, London and Paris, so full of 
these footstep memories, so haunted by impalpable ghosts of the 
traces of famous deeds, that locomotion, to one of my temperament, 
becomes a task very slow, if not painfully difficult, of accomplishment. 
'Tis a long way from the Luxor Obelisk to the Carrousel; but it's a 
week's journey when you feel inclined to stop at every half-dozen 
yards' distance, questioning yourself and the ministering spirits of 
your books, pointing your fingers to the paving-stones, and saying — 
Here the guillotine stood ; here Louis died ; here the daughter of 
Maria Theresa cast her last glance at the cupolas of the Tuileries : 
here Robespierre was hooted ; here Theroigne de Mericourt was 
scourged ; here Napoleon the Great showed the little king of Rome 
to the people ; here, on the great Carrousel Place, he, arrayed 
in the undying gray coat and little hat, reviewed the veterans of 
his guard, many and many a time at eight o'clock in the 
mobnixg. 

There ! I have brought you round to the subject-matter of this 
article, and to the complexion of "Twice Round the Clock" again; 



6S 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




EIGHT CLOCK A.M.— SAINT JAMES S PAUK — THE MALL. 69 

and the stroke is, I flatter myself, felicitous — rivalling Escobar or 
Dom Calmet in Jesuitry, Metternich and MenschikofF in diplomacy. 
You thought doubtless that I was about to launch into an interminable 
digression ; you may perhaps have said, scoffingly, that Admiral Lord 
Nelson, K.C.B., Maximillien Robespierre, Charles the First's head, 
and the Emperor Napoleon's cocked hat, could have nothing whatso- 
ever to do with the Mall of Saint James's Park at eight o'clock in 
the morning. You are mistaken. The allusions to memorable foot- 
steps were all cunningly devised with a reference to the great Field 
of Famous Footsteps — the Mall, which, were the imprint of those 
bygone pedal pressures marked out with landmarks, such as those in 
the Victory's cabin, would become a very Field of the Cloth of 
Brass. And what better time can there be to muse upon the tradi- 
tional glories of the Mall and the fame of its frequenters, than eight 
a.m. in sweet summer time ? 

I grant the clown 3 the dunderheaded moneyspinner who votes 
that books are " rubbish,'' the cobweb-brained fop who languidly de- 
clares reading to be a "bore," will find in the broad smooth Mall, 
just a Mall, broad and smooth, and nought else — even as Peter Bell 
found in a primrose by the river's brim a yellow primrose, and nothing 
more. At eight o'clock in the morning, to clown, dunderhead, and 
cobweb-brain, the Mall is a short cut from Marylebone to West- 
minster ; the water-carts are laying the dust ; mechanics are going to 
work ; there are some government offices in the distance ; two big 
guns on queer-looking carriages ; some scattered children ; a good 
many birds, making rather a disagreeable noise, in the green trees ; 
and a few cows being milked in a corner. But come with me, dweller 
in the past, lover of ancient and pleasant memories, hand-and-glove 
friend of defunct worthies, shadowy acquaintances in ruffs and peaked 
beards and point lace. Let us deliver dunderhead and cobweb-brain 
to the tormentors, and, sitting on a rustic bench beneath a spreading 
tree, summon the Famous Footsteps; summon the dead-and-gone 
walkers to pace the Mall again. Here they come ! a brave gathering, 
a courtly throng, a worshipful assemblage, but oft-times a motley 
horde and a fantastic crew. Here is Henry the Eighth's Mall, a park 
where that disreputable monarch indulged in " the games of hare and 
pheasant, partridge and heron, for his disport and pastime," and 
where he had a deer killed for the amusement of the " Embassador 
from Muscovie." Here is Saint James's Park in the reign of clever, 
shrewish, cruel Queen Bess — a park only used as an appendage to 



70 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

the tilt-yard and a nursery for deer; here is the " inward park" 
(now the inelosure and ornamental water), into which, so late as the 
commencement of Charles II. 's reign, access to the public was denied; 
and where, in 1660, Master Pepy's saw a man " basted" by the 
keeper for carrying some people over on his back through the water. 
Here is Charles II. 's famous Mall, for the first time broad and smooth, 
the park planted and reformed by the celebrated French gardener, 
Le Notre, laid out with fish-ponds and a decoy for water- fowl ; the 
Mall itself a vista of half a mile in length, on which the game of Pall 
Mall was played, and which,' always according to curious Samuel 
Pepys, who " discoursed with the keeper of the Pall Mall as he was 
sweeping it," was floored with mixed earth, and over all that cockle- 
shells, powdered and spread to keep it fast ; which, however, in dry 
weather, turned to dust and deadened the ball. In this park of 
Charles II. was the fantastic little territory of Duck Island, the 
ground contained within the channels of the decoy, and which 
London Barataria had revenues and laws and governors appointed by 
the king. The Duke of Saint Simon's friend, Saint Evremond, was 
one of these governors ; Sir John Flock another. Close to Duck 
Island was Ptosamond's Pond, a piece of water whose name bore a 
dim analogy to the soubriquet with which, in later years, Waterloo 
Bridge has been qualified; for it was in Rosamond's Pond that for- 
saken women came in preference, at even- song, to drown themselves. 
There was the Birdcage Walk, where Mr. Edward Storey kept his 
Majesty's aviary, and dwelt in the snug little hut recently demolished, 
known as Storey's Gate. There was the Mulberry Garden, into 
which the river Tyburn flows, and so into Tothill Fields and the 
Thames ; and there was Spring Gardens, where the beaux went to 
look at the citizens' wives ; and the citizens' wives, I hope, to drink 
chocolate, but I fear to look at the beaux. 

But the famous footsteps ? See, see in your mind's eye, Horatio, 
how the shadows of the old frequenters of the Mall come trooping 
along. Here is the founder of the feast himself, King Charles the 
Second, witty, worthless, and good-humoured, tramping along the 
broad expanse at eight o'clock in the morning, to the despair of his 
courtiers, who liked not walking so fast, nor getting up so early. You 
can't mistake the king's figure ; 'tis that swarthy gentleman, with the 
harshly-marked countenance, the bushy eyebrows, the lively kindling 
gray eye, and the black suit and perriwig. He walks a little in ad- 
vance of his suite with an easy, rapid gait, and at his heels follow a 



EIGHT O'CLOCK A.M. ST. JAMES S PARK — THE MALI.. 71 

little barking multitude of dogs, black, black and white, or black and 
tan, with long silky ears and feathery tails. We may see him again, 
and on the Mall, but not at eight o'clock in the morning. It is the 
afternoon of a July day, and a court cavalcade comes flaunting in 
feathers forth from Whitehall. Here is King Charles, but in a laced 
and embroidered suit, and mounted on a gaily-caparisoned charger. 
He rides with his hand in that of a lady, in a white laced waistcoat 
and crimson petticoat, and who. the chroniclers say. with her hair 
dressed a la negligence, " looks mighty pretty." but she is very dark, 
and not very well favoured, and is a poor Portuguese lady who has 
the misfortune to be Queen of England, and to have the merriest and 
the worst husband in Europe. Here is La Belle Stuart, with her hat 
cocked, and a red plume, looking, with her sweet eye, little Roman 
nose, and excellent faille, the greatest beauty that the Clerk of the 
Acts ever did see in his life. Here is Lady Castlemaine, with a yellow 
plume, but in a terrible temper that the king dees not take any notice 
of her, and in a rage when she finds that no gentleman presses to 
assist her down from her horse. Here is " our royal brother," James 
Duke of York, scowling and sulky, on his way through the Park to 
Hounslow, to enjoy his prime diversion of the chase, and escorted by 
a party of the guards in morions and steel corslets. Meniorv be £ood 
to us ! how the shadows gather around ! His Highness Oliver, T^ord 
Protector of this realm, is being borne along the Mall in a sedan chair. 
He crouches uneasily in a corner of the gilded vehicle, as though he 
feared that Colonel Titus might be lying perdu under the linden trees, 
correcting the proof sheets of ,; Killing no Murder.' 5 Sir Fopling 
Flutter bids his coachman take the carriage to Whitehall, and walks 
over the park with Belinda. Now, years later, it is Jonathan Swift 
leaving his best gown and perriwig at Mrs. Yanhomrigh's, then walk- 
ing up the Mall, by Buckingham House, and so to Chelsea. It is not 
a very well-conducted Mall just now. and Swift tells Stella that he is 
obliged to come home early through the park, to avoid the Mohocks. 
Now, back again, and to walk with decorous Mr. Evelyn, who is much 
shocked to see Xelly Gwynne leaning over her garden wall overhang- 
ing the park;. — she lived at 79. Pall Mall — and indulging in familiar 
discourse with is Old Rowley.'' Xow we are in Horace Walpole's 
time, and the macaroni-cynic of Strawberry Hill is gallanting in the 
Mall with Lady Caroline Petersham, and pretty Miss Beauclerc. and 
foolish Mrs. Sparre. Xow Lady Coventry and Walpole's niece. Lady 
Waldegrave, are mobbed in the park for being dressed in an ;, ou:" 



72 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

ish" fashion. Now, back and back again ; and the Duchess of Cleve- 
land is walking across the Mall on a dark night, pursued by three men 
in masks, who offer her no violence, but curse her as the cause of 
England's misery, and prophesy that she will one day die in a ditch, 
like Jane Shore. Forward, hark forward, and mad Margaret Nichol- 
son attempts the life of George III., as he passes in his coach through 
the Mall to open Parliament. Backward, and James II. walks across 
the park from St. James's, where he had slept, to Whitehall, to be 
crowned. A very few years after his coronation, the Dutch Guards of 
William Prince of Orange marched across from St. James's to turn the 
unlucky Stuart out of Whitehall. And now, backwards and forwards, 
and forwards and backwards, the famous shadows mingle in a fantastic 
reel, a mad waltz of extinct footsteps. Sir Roger de Coverley and 
Mr. Spectator saunter under the limes ; Beau Fielding minces by the 
side of Margaretta ; Beau Tibbs airs his clean linen and lackered 
sword hilt ; Mr. Pope meets Lady Mary's sedan, borne by Irish chair- 
men — the translator of the " Iliad" grins spitefully over his shoulder 
and makes faces at Lady Mary's black boy ; Sir Plume instructs Sir 
John Burke in the nice conduct of a clouded cane ; Goldsmith's good- 
natured man fraternises with Coleman's " brother who could eat beef; " 
Lord Fanny takes off his three-cornered hat to Mr. Moore, the in- 
ventor of the worm powders; Partridge, the almanack maker, dis- 
cusses the motions of the heavenly bodies on the banks of Bosamond's 
Pond with Count Algarotti, and becomes so excited that he nearly 
adds " one more unfortunate " to the list of Ophelias in Bosamond's 
Pond, by tumbling into the water ; Alfieri meets Lord Ligonier — tells 
him the measure of his sword, and makes a rendezvous with him for 
sunset in Hyde Park ; Lord George Gordon passes Westminster to 
St. James's, followed by a mob of yelling, screaming Protestants. 
Real people dispute the passage of the Mall with imaginary person- 
ages. The encampment of 'Eighty, the Temple of Concord, and the 
Humane Society's drags, are inextricably mixed up with scenes from 
Wycherley and Etherege; and pet passages from the "Trivia" and 
the " Rape of the Lock." I must bring myself back to reason and St. 
James's Park, and eight o'clock in the morning. I must deal hence- 
forth in realities. Here is one. 

It is the morning of the 30th of January, 1649, and a King of Eng- 
land walks across the frozen park, from St. James's, where he has 
slept, to Whitehall, the palace of his fathers. Armed men walk before, 
armed men walk behind and around; but they are no guards of honour. 



EIGHT CLOCK A.M. — ST. JAMES S PAEK — THE MALL. 73 

They escort a prisoner to the scaffold. The High Court of Justice has 
adjudged Charles Stuart, King of England, a traitor, and has decreed 
that he shall be put to death by severing his head from his body. 
President Bradshaw has put off his red robe, the man without a name 
has put on his black mask ; the axe is sharpened, the sawdust spread, 
the block prepared, the velvet-covered coffin yawns ; on its lid is 
already the leaden plate with the inscription, " King Charles, 1649." 

It is not my fault, clear reader, if the spot which your author and 
artist to command have selected for illustration of the eighth hour 
ante-meridian, be so rich in historical and literary recollections ; that 
we may fancy every inch of its surface trodden and re-trodden till the 
very soil has sunk, by the feet of the departed great; that the student, 
and the lover of old lore, must arrest himself perforce at every tree, 
and evoke remembrance at every pace. And centuries hence the Mall 
of St. James's Park will be as famous to our descendants for our deeds 
as it is now to us for the presence of our ancestors. Is not the Mall 
jet one of the most favoured resorts of the British aristocracy ? Do 
not the carriages of the nobility and gentry rattle over its broad bosom 
to dinner parties, to opera> to concerts, and to balls ? We have seen 
their chariot lamps a hundred times — we humble pedestrians and 
plebeians — -gleaming among the tufted trees, wills-o' -the -wisp of Bel- 
gravia and Tyburnia. Is not St. James's Park bounded now as then 
by high and mighty buildings : War Office, Admiralty, Stationery 
Office, Barracks ? Do not the Duke of York's steps lead from the 
Duke of York's column, between two corps cle logis, one occupied by 
wings — ethereal wings, though made of brick and stucco, of the House 
of Carlton, the abode of George the Great (the great Fritz was called 
" der grosse") of England? And the Mall itself? Is it not overlooked 
by Stafford House, the palatial ; by Marlborough House, the vast and 
roomy, once sacred to the memory of the victor of Bamilies and of 
" Old Sarah ! " but now given up to some people called artists, con- 
nected with something called the English school, and partially used as 
a livery and bait stable for the late Duke of Wellington's funeral car, 
with its sham trophies and sham horses ? Does not a scion of royalty, 
no other than his Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, frequently 
condescend to walk from his lodgings in the Stable-yard, Saint James's, 
across the park to those Horse Guards, whose affairs he administers 
with so much ability and success ? And, finally, at the western ex- 
tremity of the Mall, and on the side where once was the Mulberry 
Garden, stands there not now a palace, huge in size, clumsy in its pro- 

F 



74 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

portions, grotesque in decoration, mean in gross, frivolous in detail, 
infinitely hideous in its general appearance, but above whose ugly roof 
floats that grandest and noblest of all banners, the Royal Standard of 
England, and whose walls, half hospital, half barrack, as they remind 
us of, are hallowed as being part of Buckingham Palace, the abode of 
our good, and true, and dear Queen? She lives at the top of the Mall. 
She comes out by times on the Mali* in her golden coach, with the 
eight cream-coloured horses ; her darling little daughter passed along 
the Mall to be married ; let us hope, and heartily, to see more sons 
and daughters yet riding to their weddings through that field of 
famous footsteps. Let us hope that we may live to throw up our caps, 
and cry God bless them ! 

Great lords and ladies sweep the Mall no more with hoops and 
flowing trains of brocaded paduasoy, nor jingle on the gravel with 
silver spurs, nor crunch the minute pebbles with red heels. Broughams 
and chariots now convey the salt ones of the earth to their grand 
assemblies and solemn merry-makings ; and the few aristocrats who 
may yet pedestrianise within the precincts, are so plainly attired that 
you would find it difficult to distinguish them from plain Brown 
or Jones walking from Pimlico to Charing Cross. His Royal High* 
ness strides over from the Stable-yard to the Horse Guards in a 
shooting-jacket and tweed trousers, and in wet weather carries an 
umbrella. Nay, I have seen another Royal Highness — a bigger 
Royal Highness, so to speak, for he is consort to the Queen — riding 
under the trees of the Mall on a quiet bay, and dressed in anything 
but the first style of fashion. Were it not scandalum magnatum 
even to think such a thing, I should say that his Royal Highness's 
coat was seedy. 

At this early eight o'clock in the morningtide, see — an exception 
to the rule, however — perambulating the Mall, a tremendous "swell." 
No fictitious aristocrat, no cheap dandy, no Whitechapel buck or 
Bermondsey exquisite, no apprentice who has been to a masquerade 
disguised as a gentleman, can this be. Aristocracy is imprinted on 
every lineament of his moustached face, in every crease of his superb 
clothes, in each particular horsehair of his flowing plume. He is a 
magnificent creature, over six feet in height, with a burnished helmet, 
burnished boots, burnished spurs, burnished sabre, burnished cuirass 
—burnished whiskers and moustache. He shines all over, like a 
meteor, or a lobster which has been kept a little too long, in a dark 
room. He is young, brave, handsome, and generous; he is the 



EIGHT O'CLOCK A.M. — ST. JAMES'S PARK THE MALL. 75 

delight of Eaton Square, the cynosure of the Castor and Pollux Club, 
the idol of the corps de ballet of her Majesty's Theatre, the pet of 
several most exclusive Puseyite circles in Tyburnia, the mirror of 
Tattersall's, the pillar and patron of Jem Bundy's ratting, dog-show- 
ing, man-fighting, horse-racing, and general sporting house, in Cat and 
Fiddle Court, Dog and Duck Lane, Cripplegate. Cruel country, cruel 
fate, that compel Lieutenant Algernon Percy Plantagenet, of the Royal 
Life Guards, the handsomest man in his regiment, and heir to £9,000 
a year, to be mounting guard at eight o'clock in the morning ! He is 
mounting guard at present by smoking a cigar (one of Milo's best) on 
the Mall. By and by he will go into his barrack-room and draw 
caricatures in charcoal on the whitewashed wall. He will smoke a 
good deal, yawn a good deal, and whistle a good deal during the day, 
and will give a few words of command. For you see, my son, that 
we must all earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, and that the 
career even of a Plantagenet, with £9,000 a year, is not, throughout, 
a highway of rose-leaves ! 

From this gay and resplendent warrior, we fall, alas ! to a very 
prosaic level. As eight o'clock chimes from the smoky-faced clock of 
the Horse Guards, I try in vain (I have dismissed my shadowy 
friends) to people the Mall with aristocratic visitants. Alas and 
indeed ! the magnificent promenade of the park, on which look the 
stately mansions of the nobles, is pervaded by figures very mean, 
very poor and forlorn in appearance. Little troops of girls and 
young women are coming from the direction of Buckingham Palace 
and the Birdcage Walk, but all converging towards the Duke of 
York's column : that beacon to the great shores of Vanity Fair. 
These are sempstresses and milliners' workwomen, and are bound for 
the great Dress Factories of the West End. Pinched faces, pale 
faces, eager faces, sullen faces, peer from under the bonnets as they 
pass along and up the steps. There are faces with large mild eyes? 
that seem to wonder at the world and at its strange doings, and at 
the existence of a Necessity (it must be a Necessity, you know), for 
Jane or Ellen to work twelve hours a day ; nay, in the full London 
season, work at her needle not unfrequently all night, in order that the 
Countess or the Marchioness may have her ball dress ready. 

There is another ceremony performed with much clattering solem- 
nity of wooden panels, and iron bars, and stanchions, which occurs at 
eight o'clock in the morning. 'Tis then that the shop -shutters are 



TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 




EIGHT CLOCK A.M. — OPENING SHOP. 77 

taken down. The great " stores " and " magazines " of the principal 
thoroughfares gradually open their eyes ; apprentices, light-porters, 
and where the staff of assistants is not very numerous, the shopmen, 
release the imprisoned wares, and bid the sun shine on good family 
" souchong," " fresh Epping sausages," " Beaufort collars," " guinea 
capes," " Eureka shirts,'* and "Alexandre harmoniums." In the 
smaller throughfares, the proprietor often dispenses with the aid of 
apprentice, light-porter, and shopman — for the simple reason that he 
never possessed the services of any assistants at all — and unosten- 
tatiously takes down the shutters of his own chandler's, green-grocer's, 
tripe, or small stationery shop. In the magnificent linendrapery 
■establishments of Oxford and Regent Streets, the vast shop-fronts, 
museums of fashion in plate-glass cases, offer a series of animated 
tableaux of poses plastiques in the shape of young ladies in morning 
costume, and jfaung gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths, fault- 
lessly complete as to costume, with the exception that the}' are yet in 
their shirt sleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and mysterious 
feat known as "dressing" the shop window. By their nimble and 
practised hands the rich piled velvet mantles are displayed, the moire 
and glace silks arranged in artful folds, the laces and gauzes, the innu- 
merable whim-whams and fribble-frabble of fashion, elaborately shown, 
and to their best advantage. 

Now, all over London, the shops start into new life. Butchers 
and bakers, and candlestick makers, grocers and cheesemongers, and 
pastrycooks, tailors, linendrapers, and milliners, crop up with mush- 
room-like rapidity. But I must leave them, to revisit them in all 
their glory a few hours later. Leave, too, the Park arid its Mall, 
with the cows giving milk of a decidedly metropolitan flavour, and 
the children and the nursemaids, and the dilapidated dramatic authors 
reading the manuscripts of their five-act tragedies to themselves, and 
occasionally reciting favourite passages in deep diapason on the 
benches under the trees. Leave, too, the London sparrows, and — 
would that we could leave it altogether — the London smoke, which 
already begins to curl over and cover up the city like a blanket, and 
which will not keep clear of the Mall, even at eight o'clock in the 



78 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK, 



NINE O'CLOCK A.M.— THE CLERKS AT THE BANK, 
AND THE BOATS ON THE RIVER. 

It is nine o'clock, and London has breakfasted. Some uncon- 
sidered tens of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what 
appetite they might their prse-prandial meal ; the upper fifty thousand, 
again, have not yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast 
till ten, eleven o'clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, 
languid members of fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents 
of Jermyn Street, and the high-priced second floors of Little Ryder 
Street, St. James's, upon whom one, two, and three o'clock in the 
afternoon shall be but as dawn, and whose broiled bones and devilled 
kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the damask breakfast- cloth before Sol 
is red in the western horizon. 

I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information, 
when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every 
acre of turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black 
hole per mensem for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict 
jackets, that some M'Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the 
amount of provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of 
London every morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs 
are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, 
and how many fried ; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to 
make bread-and-butter, thick and thin ; how many porkers have been 
sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky : what rivers 
have been drained, what fuel consumed, what mounds of salt employed, 
what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure the finny haddocks 
and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning repast. Say, too, 
Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands are matutinally 
made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, covered 
with that circular layer — abominable disc ! — of oleaginous nastiness, 
apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known as 
clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that sur- 
rounds the truffle bedecked pate defoiegras. Say, Elizabeth Lazenby, 
how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine 
unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat, 
game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with 



NINE O CLOCK A.M. THE CLEEKS AT THE BANK. 79 

nine o'clock breakfasts. Queries upon queries suggest themselves to 
the inquisitive mind. Speculations upon speculations present them- 
selves to him who is observant. Are those eggs we see in the coffee- 
shop windows, by the side of the lean chop with a curly tail, the tea- 
pot with the broken spout, and the boulder-looking kidneys, ever 
eaten, and if so, what secret do the coffee-shop proprietors possess of 
keeping them from entire decomposition ? For I have watched these 
eggs for weeks together, and known them by bits of straw and flecks 
of dirt mucilaginously adhering to their shells, to be the selfsame 
eggs : yet when I have entered the unpretending house of refresh- 
ment, and ordered " tea and an egg" I have seen the agile but dingy 
handmaiden swiftly approach the window, slide the glass panel back 
with nimble (though dusky) fingers, convey an egg to the mysterious 
kitchen in the background, and in a few minutes place the edible 
before me boiled, yet with sufficient marks of the straw upon it to 
enable me to discern my ancient friend. Who, again, invented 
muffins ? — and what becomes of all the cold crossbuns after Good 
Friday? I never saw a crossbun on Holy Saturday, and I believe 
the boy most addicted to saccharine dainties would scorn one. 

So hungry London breakfasts, but not uniformly well, at nine 
o'clock in the morning. In quietly grim squares, in the semi-aris- 
tocratic North- West End — I don't mean Russell and Bloomsbury, but 
Gordon, Tavistock, Queen, and Camden, on the one side, and Man- 
chester and Portman on the other— the nine o'clock breakfast takes 
place in the vast comfortless dining-room, with the shining side-board 
(purchased at the sale of Sir Hector Ajacks, the great Indian general's, 
effects), and the portrait of the master of the house (Debenham Storr, 
H.A., pinxit), crimson curtain and column in foreground, dessert plate, 
cut orange, and — supposed — silver hand-bell in front ditto. This is 
the sort of room where there is a Turkey carpet that has been pur- 
chased at the East India Company's sale rooms, in Billiter Street, and 
which went cheap because there was a hole in one corner, carefully 
darned subsequently by the mistress of the house. The master comes 
down stairs gravely, with a bald head — the thin, gray hair carefully 
brushed over the temples, and a duffel dressing-gown. He spends five 
minutes in his " study," behind the breakfast dining-room; not, good- 
ness knows, to consult the uncut books on the shelves — uncomfortable 
works, like Helps' s " Friends in Council," that scrap of rusty Bacon, and 
Mr. Harriet Martineau's " India," are among the number; but to break 
the seals of the letters ranged for him on the leather-covered table — 



80 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

he reads his correspondence at breakfast — to unlock, perchance, one 
drawer, take out his cheque-book, and give it one hasty flutter, one 
loving glance, and to catch up and snuggle beneath his arm the copy 
of the " Times " newspaper, erst damped, but since aired at the 
kitchen fire, which the newsvender's boy dropped an hour since down 
the area. It may be, too, that he goes into that uselessly (to him) 
book-furnished room, because he thinks it a good, a grand, a respect- 
able thing to have a " study " at all. This is the sort of house where 
they keep a footman, single-handed — a dull knave, who no more re- 
sembles the resplendent flunkey of Eaton Square or Westbourne 
Terrace, than does the cotton-stockinged "greencoat " of the minor 
theatres ; who is told that he must wear a morning jacket, and who 
accoutres himself in a striped jerkin, baggy in the back and soiled at 
the elbows, that makes him look like an hostler, related, on the mother's 
side, to a Merry Andrew. The mistress of the house comes down to 
nine o'clock breakfast, jingling the keys in her little basket, and with 
anxious pre- occupation mantling from her guipure collar to her false 
front, for those fatal crimson housekeeping books are to be audited 
this morning, and she is nervous. The girls come down in brown- 
holland jackets and smartly dowdy skirts, dubious as to the state of 
their back hair ; the eldest daughter frowning after her last night's 
course of theology (intermingled with the last novel from Mr. 
Mudie's). As a rule, the young ladies are very ill-tempered ; and, 
equally as a rule, there is always one luckless young maiden in a 
family of grown-up daughters who comes down to breakfast with her 
stockings down at heel, and is sternly reprimanded during breakfast 
because one of her shoes comes off under the table ; he who denounces 
her being her younger brother, the lout in the jacket, with the surrep- 
titious peg-top in his pocket, who attends the day-school of the 
London University, and cribs his sisters' Berlin-wool canvas to mend 
his Serpentine yacht sails with. The children too old to breakfast in 
the nursery come down gawky, awkward, tumbling, and discontented, 
for they are as yet considered too young to partake of the frizzled 
bits of bacon which are curling themselves in scorched agony on the 
iron footman before the grate, the muffins, which sodden in yellow 
butter-pools in the Minton plates on the severely-creased damask 
table-cloth, or the dry toast which, shrivelled and forbidding, grins 
from between the Sheffield-plated bars of the rack. The servants 
come in, not to morning breakfast, but to morning prayers. The 
housemaid has just concluded her morning flirtation with the baker ; 



NINE CLOCK A.M. THE CLERKS AT THE BANK. 81 

the cook has been crying over " Fatherless Fanny." The master of 
the house reads prayers in a harsh, grating voice, and Miss Charlotte, 
aged thirteen, is sent to her bed-room, with prospects of additional 
punishment, for eating her curl-papers during matins. The first organ- 
grinder arrives in the square during breakfast ; and the master of the 
house grimly reproves the children who are beginning to execute in- 
voluntary polkas on their chairs, and glowers at the governess — she is 
such a meek young creature, marked with the small-pox, that I did 
not think it worth while to mention her before — who manifests 
symptoms of beating her sad head to the music. How happy, at least 
how relieved, everybody is when the master exchanges his duffel 
dressing-gown for a blue body-coat, takes his umbrella, and drives off 
in his brougham to the city or Somerset House ! The children are 
glad to go to their lessons, though they hate them at most times, 
passably. Miss Meek, the governess, is glad to install herself in her 
school-room, and grind " Mangnall's Questions," and "Blair's Pre- 
ceptor," till the children's dinner, at one o'clock; though she would, 
perhaps, prefer shutting herself up in her own room and having 
a good cry. The mistress finds consolation, too, in going downstairs 
and quarrelling with the cook, and then going upstairs and being 
quarrelled with by the nurse. Besides, there will be plenty of time 
for shopping before Mr. M. comes home. The girls are delighted that 
cross papa is away. Papa always wants to know what the letters are 
about which they write at the little walnut-tree tables with the twisted 
legs. Papa objects to the time wasted in working the application 
collars. Papa calls novel reading and pianoforte practice " stuff," 
with a very naughty adjective prefixed thereunto. This is the sort of 
house that is neatly, solidly furnished from top to toe, with every 
modern convenience and improvement: with bath-rooms, conserva- 
tories, ice cellars ; with patent grates, patent door-handles, dish-lifts, 
asbestos stoves, gas cooking ranges, and excruciatingly complicated 
ventilatory contrivances ; and this is also the sort of house where, 
with all the conveniences I have mentioned, every living soul who in- 
habits it is uncomfortable. 

As the clock strikes nine, you see the last school-children flock in 
to the narrow alley behind St. Martin's Lane, hard by the Lowther 
Arcade, and leading to the national schools. They have been romping 
and playing in the street this half-hour; and it was but the iron 
tongue of St. Martin that interrupted that impending fight between 
the young brothers Puddicomb, from King Street, Long Acre, who 



82 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

are always fighting, and that famous clapper- clawing match between 
Polly Briggs and Susey Wright. At the last stroke of nine there 
hurries into the school corridor a comely female teacher in a green 
plaid shawl : and, woe be unto her ! nine has struck full ten minutes, 
when the inevitable laggard of every school appears, half skurrying, 
half crawling, her terror combating with her sluggishness, from the 
direction of Leicester Square. She is a gaunt, awkward girl, in a 
" flibberty-flobberty " hat, a skimping gray cape, with thunder-and- 
lightning buttons, an absurdly short skirt, and lace-edged trousers, 
that trail over her sandaled shoes. Add to this her slate and satchel, 
and she is complete. When will parents cease, I wonder, to attire 
their children in this ridiculous and preposterous manner. Hannah 
(her name is Hannah, for certain !) left her home in Bear Street in ex- 
cellent time for school ; but she has dawdled, and loitered, and gloated 
over every sweetstuff and picture shop, and exchanged languid re- 
partees with rude boys. She will be kept in to a certainty this after- 
noon, will Hannah ! 

Now is the matutinal occupation of the milkwoman nearly gone ; 
her last cries of " Milk, ho ! " die away in faint echoes, and she might 
reasonably be supposed to enjoy a holiday till the afternoon's milk for 
tea were required ; but not so. To distant dairies she hies, and to all 
appearances occupies herself in scrubbing her milk pails till three 
o'clock. I have a great affection (platonic) for milkwomen. I should 
like to go down to Wales and see them when they are at home. What 
clean white cotton stockings they wear, on — no, not their legs — on the 
posts which support their robust torsos ! How strong they are ! 
There are many I should be happy to back, and for no inconsiderable 
trifle either, to thrash Ben Caunt. Did you ever know any one who 
courted a milkwoman ? Was there ever a milkwoman married, besides 
Madam Vestris, in the " Wonderful Woman ? " Yes ; I love them— 
their burly forms ; their mahogany faces, handsomely veneered by wind 
and weather ; their coarse straw bonnets flattened at the top ; their 
manly lace-up boots, and those wonderful mantles on their shoulders, 
which are neither shawl, tippet, cape nor scarf, but a compound of all, 
and are of equally puzzling colour and patterns. 

The postman is breakfasting in the interval between the eight and 
the ten o'clock delivery. Does he take his scarlet tunic off when he 
breakfasts ? Does he beguile the short hour of refreshment by read- 
ing, between snaps of bread and butter and gulps of coffee, short 
extracts from " A Double Knock at the Postman's Conscience," by 



NINE O CLOCK A.M. THE CLERKS AT THE BAXK. 83 

the Reverend Mr. Davis, Ordinary of Newgate ? For if the postman 
reads not during breakfast-time, I am wholly at a loss to know, dog- 
tired as he must be when he comes home from his rounds at night, 
when he can find time for pursuing his literary studies. By the 
way, where does the postman lodge r I have occupied apart- 
ments in the same house with a policeman ; I was once aware of 
the private residence of a man who served writs : and I have taken 
tea in the parlour of the Pandean pipes to a Punch-and- Judy ; but 
I never knew personally the abode of a postman. Mr. Sculthorpe 
and Mr. Peacock know them but too frequently, to the postman's 
cost. 

Nine o'clock, and the grande armee of iS musicianers " debouches 
from Spitalfields, and Leather Lane, Holborn, and far-off Clerkenwell, 
and, in compact columns, move westward. Nine o'clock, and the 
sonorous cry of " Old clo' !" is heard in sequestered streets chiefly 
inhabited by bachelors. Nine o'clock, and another grande armee 
veers through Temple Bar, charges down Holborn Hill, escalades 
Finsbury, captures Cornhill by a dexterous flank movement, and sits 
down and invests the Bank of England in regular form. This is 
London going to business in the city. 

If the morning be fine, the pavement of the Strand and Fleet 
Street looks quite radiant with the spruce clerks walking down to 
their offices, governmental, financial, and commercial. Marvellous 
young bucks some of them are. These are the customers, you see at 
a glance, whom the resplendent wares in the hosiers' shops attract, 
and in whom those wary industrials find avid customers. These are 
the dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, 
and the rose-pink gloves: the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic 
shirt-shuds, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, deaths' heads, race- 
horses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls ; the horseshoe, fox-head, pewter- 
pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern-plate, and knife -and-fork pins. 
These are the glasses of city fashion, and the mould of city form, for 
whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen, and of seventeen 
shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented, and warranted, are made ; 
for these ingenious youths coats with strange names are devised, 
scarves and shawls of wondrous pattern and texture despatched from 
distant Manchester and Paisley. For them the shiniest of hats, the 
knobbiest of sticks, gleam through shop-windows ; for them the geni- 
uses of " all-round collars " invent every week fresh yokes of starched 
linen, pleasant instruments of torture, reminding us equally of the 



84 



TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK, 




NINE CLOCK A.M. — THE BOATS ON THE HIYEK. 



So 




86 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

English pillory, the Chinese cangue, the Spanish garotte, the French 
lacarne to the guillotine (that window from which the criminal looks 
out into eternity), and the homely and cosmopolitan dog-collar ! 
There are some of these gay clerks who go down to their offices with 
roses at their button-holes, and with cigars in their mouths ; there 
are some who wear peg-top trousers, chin-tufts, eye-glasses, and var- 
nished boots. These mostly turn off in the Strand, and are in the 
Admiralty or Somerset House. As for the government clerks of the 
extreme West-end — the patricians of the Home and Foreign Offices 
— the bureaucrats of the Circumlocution Office, in a word — they ride 
down to Whitehall or Downing Street in broughams or on park hacks. 
Catch them in omnibuses, or walking on the vulgar pavement, for- 
sooth ! The flags of Eegent Street they might indeed tread gingerly, 
at three o'clock in the afternoon ; but the Strand, and at nine o'clock 
in the morning ! Forbid it, gentility ! I observe — to return to the 
clerks who are bending citywards — that the most luxuriant whiskers 
belong to the Bank of England. I believe that there are even 
whisker clubs in that great national institution, where prizes are 
given for the best pair offavoris grown without macassar. You may, 
as a general rule, distinguish government from commercial clerks by 
the stern repudiation of the razor, as applied to the beard and mous- 
taches, by the former ; and again I may remark, that the prize for 
the thinnest and most dandy-looking umbrellas- must be awarded, as of 
right, to the clerks in the East India House— mostly themselves slim, 
natty gentlemen, of jaunty appearance, who are all supposed to have 
had tender affairs with the widows of East India colonels. You 
may know the cashiers in the private banking houses by their white 
hats and buff waistcoats ; you may know the stock-brokers by their 
careering up Ludgate Hill in dog-carts, and occasionally tandems, 
and by the pervading sporting appearance of their costume ; you may 
know the Jewish commission agents by their flashy broughams, with 
lapdogs and ladies in crinoline beside them ; you may know the 
sugar-bakers and the soap-boilers by the comfortable double-bodied A 
carriages with fat horses in which they roll along ; you may know 
the Manchester warehousemen by their wearing gaiters, always 
carrying their hands in their pockets, and frequently slipping into 
recondite city taverns up darksome alleys, on their way to Cheapside, 
to make a quiet bet or so on the Chester Cup or the Liverpool Steeple- 
chase ; you may know, finally, the men with a million of money, or 
thereabouts, by their being ordinarily very shabby, and by their 



NINE O CLOCK A.M. — THE BOAT ON THE RIYEE. 87 

wearing shocking bad hats, which have seemingly never been brushed, 
on the backs of their heads. 

"Every road/' says the proverb, "leads to Rome ;" every com- 
mercial ways leads to the Bank of England. And there, in the midst 
of that heterogeneous architectural jumble between the Bank of Eng- 
land itself, the Royal Exchange, the Poultry, Cornhill, and the Globe 
Insurance Office, the vast train of omnibuses, that have come from 
the West and that have come from the East — that have been rumbling 
along the Macadam while I was prosing on the pedestrians — with 
another great army of clerk martyrs outside and inside, their knees 
drawn up to their chins, and their chins resting on their umbrella 
handles, set down their loads of cash-book and ledger fillers. What 
an incalculable mass of figures must there be collected in those com- 
mercial heads ! What legions of £. s. d. ! What a chaos of cash 
debtor, contra creditor, bii payable, and bills receivable ; waste- 
books, day-books, cash-books, and journals ; insurance policies, broker- 
age, agio, tare and tret, dock warrants, and general commercial be- 
devilment ! They file off to their several avocations, to spin money 
for others, often, poor fellows, while they themselves are blest with 
but meagre stipends. They plod away to their gloomy wharves and 
hard-hearted counting-houses, where the chains from great cranes 
wind round their bodies, and they dance hornpipes in bill-file and 
cash-box fetters, and the mahogany of the desks enters into their 
souls. Upon my word, I think if I were doomed to clerkdom, that I 
should run away and enlist ; but that would avail me little, for I am 
equally certain that, were I a grenadier, and my commanding officer 
made me mount guard, that I should pop my musket into the sentry- 
box and run away too. 

So the omnibuses meet at the Bank and disgorge the clerks by 
hundreds ; repeating this operation scores of times between nine and 
ten o'clock. But you are not to delude yourself, that either by 
wheeled vehicle or by the humbler conveyances known as " Shanks's 
mare," and the "Marrowbone stage" — in more refined language, 
walking — have all those who have business in the city reached their 
destination. No ; the Silent Highway has been their travelling route. 
On the broad — would that I could add the silvery and sparkling — 
bosom of Father Thames, they have been borne in swift, grimy little 
steamboats, crowded with living freights from Chelsea, and Pimlico, 
and Vauxhall piers, from Hungerford, Waterloo, Temple, Blackfriars, 
and South wark— straight by the hay-boats, with their lateen sails dis- 



88 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

coloured in a manner that would delight a painter, straight by Thames 
police hulks, by four and six-oared cutters, by coal-barges, and great 
lighters laden with bricks and ashes and toiling towards Putney and 
Richmond ; by oozy wharves and grim-chimneyed factories ; by little, 
wheezy, tumbledown waterside public-houses ; by breweries, and 
many- windowed warehouses ; by the stately gardens of the Temple, 
and the sharp-pointed spires of city churches, and the great dome of 
Paul's looming blue in the morning, to the Old Shades Pier, hard by 
London Bridge. There is landing and scuffling and pushing ; the 
quivering old barges, moored in the mud, are swaying and groaning 
beneath trampling feet. Then, for an instant, Thames Street, Upper 
and Lower, is invaded by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who 
mingle strangely with the fish- women and the dock-porters. But the 
insatiable counting-houses soon swallow them up : as though London's 
commercial maw were an hungered too, for breakfast, at nine o'clock 
in the morning. 



TEN O'CLOCK A.M.— THE COUBT OF QUEEN'S BENCH, 
AND THE " BENCH" ITSELF. 

The author presents his compliments to the " neat-handed Philiis" 
who answers (when she is in a good temper, which is but seldom) the 
second-floor bell, takes in his letters, brings up his breakfast, stands 
in perpetual need of being warned not to light the fire with the proof- 
sheets of his last novel, pamphlet on the war, or essay on the iEolic 
digamma, or twist into cigar-lights the cheques for large amounts 
continually sent him by his munificent publishers, and exercises her 
right of search over his tea-caddy and the drawer containing his 
cravats, all-round collars, and billet-doux ; the author and your 
servant presents his compliments to Philiis — ordinarily addressed by 
Mrs. Lillicrap, the landlady, as " Mariar, you 'ussey" — and begs her 
to procure for him immediately a skin of the creamiest parchment, 
free from grease, a bottle of record ink, a quill plucked from the wing 
of a hawk, vulture, or some kindred bird of prey, a box of pounce, a 
book of patterns of German text for engrossing, and a hank of red 
tape or green ferret, whichsoever, in her aesthetic judgment, she may 



THE QUEEN S BENCH, AND THE QUEEN S BENCH PRISON. 89 

prefer. He would be further obliged if she would step round to the 
author's solicitor, and ask, not for that little bill of costs, which has 
been ready for some time, but which he is not in the slightest hurry 
for — but for copies of Tidd's Practice, the Law List, and Lord St. 
Leonards' " Handy Book on Property Law." For I, the author, 
intend to be strictly legal at ten o'clock in the morning. I serve you 
with this copy of "Twice Round the Clock" as with a writ ; and in 
the name of Victoria, by the grace, &c, send you greeting, and com- 
mand— L no, not command, but beg— that within eight days you enter 
an appearance, to purchase this volume. Else will I invoke the 
powers of the great ca. sa. and the terrible fi. fa. I will come against 
you, with sticks and staves, and the sheriff of Middlesex shall take 
you, to have and to hold, wheresoever you may be found running up 
and down in his bailiwick. So?i nutrito di latte legale. I am fed with 
law's milk at this hour of the morning. Shear me the sheep for 
vellum, fill me with quips and quiddities ; bind me apprentice to a 
law stationer in the Lane of Chancery, over-against Cursitor Street ; 
and let me also send in a little bill of costs to my publishers, and 
charge them so much a " folio," instead of so much a " sheet." 

This exercitation over, and the necessary stationery brought by 
Phillis, alias " Mariar," I approach my great, grim subject with 
diffident respect. What do I know of law, save that if I pay not, the 
Alguazils will lay me by the heels ; that if I steal, I shall go to the 
hulks ; that if I kill, I shall go hang ? What do I know of Sinderesis, 
feoffors and feoffees, and the law of tailed lands ? What of the Assize 
of Mortdancestor ', tenants in dower, villein entry — of Sylva ccedua, 
which is, I am sure you will be glad to hear, more familiarly known 
as the 45th of Edward the Third r These things are mysteries to me. 
I bought the habeas corpus once (the palladium of our liberties is an 
expensive luxury), but its custodian scarcely allowed me to look at it, 
and, hailing a cab, desired me to " look alive." I have been defendant 
in an action, but I never could make out why they should have done 
the things to me that they did, and why John Lord Campbell at 
Westminster should have been so bitter against me. I never was on 
a jury ; but I have enjoyed the acquaintance of an Irish gentleman 
whose presence on the panel was considered invaluable at state trials, 
he having the reputation of an indomitable " boot-eater." Finally, I 
have, as most men have, a solicitor, a highly respectable party, who, 
of course, only charges me the " costs out of pocket." But what is 
the exact measure of " costs out of pocket ?" I never knew. 

G 



90 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Not wholly destitute of legal literature is your servant, however. 
In Pope and Arbuthnot's Reports (vide Miscellanies) I have read the 
great case of Stradlings versus Styles, respecting the piebald horses 
and the horses that were pied, and have pondered much over that 
notable conclusion (in Norman- French) by the reporter — " Je heard 
no more parceque j'etais asleep sur mong bench." I have followed 
the arguments in Bardell versus Pickwick : I have seen the " Avocat 
Patelin" and the " Lottery Ticket ; " I have paced the Salle des Pas 
Perdus in Paris, and Westminster Hall, London ; I knew a captain 
once who lived in the equally defunct " rules" of the Queen's Bench ; 
and I have played racquets in the area of that establishment, as an 
amateur (?). So, then, though, in a very humble degree, I conceive 
myself qualified to discourse to you concerning legal London at ten 
o'clock in the morning. 

The judges of the land — of Queen's Bench, Exchequer, and 
Common Pleas, Chief-Justices, Barons, and Puisne Judges, and Sages 
of the Court of Probate, Divorce, and Matrimonial Causes — are mostly 
jaunty, elderly gentlemen of cheerful appearance, given in private 
life to wearing light neckcloths, buff waistcoats, and pepper-and-salt 
trousers, and particularly addicted to trotting down to the Courts of 
Westminster mounted on stout hacks — 'tis the bishops, par excellence, 
who ride the cobs — and followed by sober grooms. There are judges 
who, it is reported, make up considerable books for the Derby and 
Oaks — nay, for the double event. I have seen a judge in a white 
hat, and I have seen a vice-chancellor drinking iced fruit effervescent 
at Stainsbury's in the Strand. 

Parliament Street and Palace Yard are fair to see, this pleasant 
morning in Term time. The cause list for all the courts is pretty full, 
and there is a prospect of nice legal pickings. The pavement is 
dotted with barristers' and solicitors' clerks carrying blue and crimson 
bags plethoric with papers. Smart attorneys, too, with shoe-ribbon, 
light vests, swinging watch-guards, and shiny hats (they have begun 
to wear moustaches even, the attorneys !), bustle past, papers beneath 
their arms, open documents in their hands, which they sort and peruse 
as they walk. The parti-coloured fastenings of these documents 
flutter, so that you would take these men of law for so many con- 
jurors about to swallow red and green tape. And they do conjure, 
and to a tune, the attorneys. Lank office-boys, in hats too large, 
and corduroys and tweeds too short, and jackets, stained with ink, 
too short for them ; cadaverous office-runners and process-servers, in 



THE QUEEN S BENCH, AND THE QUEEN S BENCH PRISON. 91 

greasy and patched habiliments, white at the seams; bruised and 
battered, ruby-nosed law-writers, skulking down to Westminster in 
quest of a chance copying job ; managing clerks, staid men given to 
abdominal corpulence, who wear white neckcloths, plaited shirt-frills, 
black satin waistcoats, and heavy watch chains and seals, worn, in the 
good old fashion, underneath the vest, and pendulous from the base 
line thereof, file along the pavement to their common destination, the 
great Hall of Pleas at Westminster. The great solicitors and attorneys, 
men who may be termed the princes of law, who are at the head of 
vast establishments in Bedford Row and Lincoln's Inn Fields, and 
whose practice is hereditary, dash along in tearing cabs : you look 
through the windows, and see an anxious man, with bushy gray 
whiskers, sitting inside ; the cushions beside and before him littered, 
piled, cumbered, with tape-tied papers. He has given Sir Fitzroy 
three hundred, Sir Richard five hundred, guineas, for an hour's 
advocacy. Thousands depend upon the decision of the twelve worthy 
men who will be in the jury-box in the course of an hour. See ! one 
of them is cheapening apples at a stall at this very moment, and tells 
his companion (who has just alighted from a chaise-cart) that in that 
little shop yonder Marley murdered the watchmaker's shopman. 
Great lawyers such as these have as many noble fortunes in their 
hands as great doctors have noble lives. Of the secrets of noble repu- 
tations, doctors and lawyers are alike custodians ; and, trustworthy. 

The briefless barristers would like to patronise cabs, but they can't 
afford those luxuries. They walk down Parliament Street arm-in-arm, 
mostly men with bold noses of the approved Slawkenbergius pattern, 
and very large red or sandy whiskers. Whiskers cost nothing, noses 
are cheap— I had mine broken once for nothing, though it cost me 
several pounds sterling to get it mended again. Their briefless clothes 
are very worn and threadbare, their hats napless, their umbrellas — 
they always carry umbrellas — gape at the mouth, and distend at the 
nozzle. These barristers are second wranglers, fellows of their college, 
prizemen; they have pulled stroke-oar, and bibbed at wine parties 
given by marquises. They are very poor and briefless now. The cham- 
bers in the Temple are very high up ; the carpet, ragged ; the laundress 
is a tipsy shrew who pilfers ; the boot-boy insists upon serving up 
small coal broiled with the mutton chops. It is but seldom, but very 
seldom, that they can order a steak at the u Rainbow," or demand a 
bottle of Port from the plump waiter at the " Cock." No attorneys 
ascend their staircase ; no briefs are frayed in being pushed through the 



02 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

aperture of their letter-boxes ; editors are deaf, and the only magazine 
which receives their contributions don't pay. They cannot help asking 
themselves sometimes, sadly and querulously, poor fellows, of what 
avail is the grand classical education, tedious and expensive ; the 
slaving for a degree or for honours ; the long nights spent beneath the 
glare of the reading lamp, learning and re-learning the palimpsests of 
law ; of what avail are the joints of mutton and bottles of heady wine 
consumed at the keeping-term dinners ; of what avail the square of 
the hypothenuse, and the knowledge (in the best Latin) that strong 
men lived before Agamemnon ; of what avail the wig (it is getting 
unpowdered), the gown (it is growing threadbare), and the big Greek 
prize-books with the College arms emblazoned on the covers ? Lo ! 
there is Tom Cadman, who has been an unsuccessful play-actor and an 
usher in a cheap boarding-school, writing leaders for a daily paper in 
the coffee-room of the " Albion," or returning thanks for the press at 
a champagne dinner ; there is Roger Bullyon, of the Home Circuit, 
whose only talent is abuse, who knows no more of law than he does of 
the conduct to be expected from a gentleman, who will never, if he live 
till ninety, be more than a fluent, insolent donkey, and yet there he is, 
with more briefs than he can carry, or his clerk compute the fees on. 
But console yourselves, oh, ye briefless ones. Though the race be not to 
the swift, nor the battle to the strong, your chance is yet in the lucky- 
bag ; the next dive may bring it forth splendid and triumphant. 

" No one is so accursed by fate, 
No one so utterly desolate, 
But some heart, though, unknown, 
Eesponds unto his own." 

Mr. Right, the attorney, is coming post-haste after you, his waistcoat 
pockets distended w r ith retainers and refreshers. In that tremendous 
lottery of the law, as wise Mr. Thackeray terms it, who shall say that 
you may not be next the fortunatewretches who shall win the prize— 
the gros lot? To-day is poverty and heart-sickening hope deferred 
and the pawn-shop ; but to-morrow may make you the thunderer 
before the judicial committee of the Privy Council on the great appeal 
from Bombay, Parsetjee-Jamsetjee-Ramsetjee Loll versus Boomajee- 
Krammajee-Howdajee Chow. It may make you standing counsel to 
the Feejee Islands Company, or defender of group 97 of Railway 
Bills. So, despair not, briefless man j but pause before you sell that 
sheet anchor of hope, of yours, for old iron. 



THE QUEEN'S BENCH, AND THE QUEEN 's BENCH PRISON. 93 

Barristers in large practice drive over Westminster Bridge's crazy 
arches (the rogues have houses at Norwood and Tulse Hill,with con- 
servatories and pineries) in small phaetons or gleaming clarences, with 
sleek white horses. They have wives rustling in sheeny silks and 
glowing with artificial flowers, who, their lords being deposited in the 
temple of Theseus, are borne straight away to Stagg and Mantell's, or 
"Waterloo House ; or, perchance, to that glorious avenue of Covent 
Garden Market, where they price cucumbers at Mrs. Solomon's, and 
bouquets at Mrs. Buck's. For, note it as a rule, though it may seem a 
paradox, people who have kitchen-gardens and hot-houses are always 
buying fruit, flowers, and vegetables. The steady-going old Nisi Prius 
barristers, in good practice — sedate fogies — with their white neckcloths 
twisted like halters round their necks ; pompous old fellows, who jingle 
keys and sovereigns in their pockets, as, their hands therein, they prop 
up the door-jambs of the robing-room, in converse with weasel-faced 
attorneys, are borne to Westminster in cabs. Very hard are they upon 
the cabman, paying him but the exact fare, and threatening him w T ith 
the severest terrors of the law at the slightest attempt at overcharge ; 
and much are they maledicted by the badged Jehus as they drive 
slowly away. These Nisi Prius worthies are great hands at a rubber of 
whist, and are as good judges of port-wine as they are of law. 

Whence comes the Chief, the leader, the great advocate of the day, 
who carries attorney and solicitor general, chief-justice, chancellor, peer, 
written as legibly on his brow as Cain carried the brand 1 — how he 
reaches Westminster Hall, or how he gets away from it, no man can 
tell. He will make a four hours' speech to-day, drive eight witnesses 
to the verge of distraction, blight with sarcasm, and sear with denuncia- 
tion, a semi-idiotic pig-jobber, the defendant in an action of breach of 
promise of marriage, in which the plaintiff is a stay-maker of the mature 
age of thirty-seven. What shrieks of laughter will ring through the 
court when in burning accents, in which irony is mingled with indig- 
nation, the Chief reads passages from the love-smitten but incautious 
pig-jobber's correspondence, and quotes from his poetical effusions (they 
will write poetry, these defendants) such passages as — 

" When you tork 
You are like roast pork." 
Or, 

" Say, luvley chine, 
"Will you be mine.' , 



94 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Two hours afterwards, and the Chief will be on the other side of West- 
minster Hall, in the Commons' House of Parliament, pounding away 
on the wrongs of a few people in Staffordshire who object to the odour 
of some neighbouring gas-works, and, to use an Americanism, "chawing 
up " the ministry at a tremendous rate. How is it that about the 
same time he manages to dine with the Merchant Cobblers at their 
grand old hall on St. Crispin's Hill; to take the chair at the festival of 
the Association for improving the moral condition of Mudlarks; to 
make a two hours' speech at the meeting for the suppression of street 
" catch-'em-alive-O's ;" to look in at half-a-dozen west-end clubs; to hear 
Bosio — ah ! poor Bosio, ah, poor swan, miasma'd to death in the horrid 
marshes of Ingria and Carelia — in the last act of the " Traviata ;" and 
to be seen flitting out of the bar-parlour of Joe Muttonfist's hostelry 
in Mauley Court-yard, Whitechapel, where the whereabouts of the 
impending great fight between Dan Bludyer, surnamed the ft Mugger,' 5 
and Tim Sloggan, better known as " Copperscull," for two hundred 
pounds a-side, will be imparted to the patrons of the " fancy?" Tom 
Stoat, who knows everything and everybody, says he saw the Chief 
at the Crystal Palace Flower Show, and it is certain that he (the 
Chief) will be at the Queen's Ball to-night (he has a dinner party this 
evening), and that after the opera he will take a chop and kidney at 
Evans's. And after that ? What a life ! What frame can bear, what 
mind endure it ! When does he study ? when does he read those mam- 
moth briefs 1 when does he note those cases, prepare those eloquent 
exordia and perorations ? Whence comes the minute familiarity with 
every detail of the case before him which he seems to possess, the 
marvellous knowledge he displays of the birth, parentage, education, 
and antecedents of the trembling witnesses whom he cross-examines ? 
What a career ! and see, there is its Hero, shambling into Westminster 
Hall, a spare, shrunken, stooping, prematurely- aged man. He has not 
had a new wag these ten years, and his silk gown is shabby, almost to 
raggedness. He is no doubt arguing some abstruse point of law with 
that voluble gentleman, his companion, in the w T hite waistcoat. Let us 
approach and listen, for I am Asmodeus and we are eaves-droppers* 
Point of law 1 Upon my word, he is talking about the Chester Cup. 

In with ye, then, my merry men all, to the hall of Westminster, for 
the Court of Queen's Bench is sitting. It is not a handsome court ; it 
is not an imposing court. If I w T ere to say that it was a very mean 
and ugly room, quite unworthy to figure as an audience-chamber for 



THE QUEEN S BENCH, AND IHE QUEEN S BENCH PRISON. 95 

the judges of the land, I don't think that I should be in error. Where 
are the lictors and the fasces? Where the throned dais on which the 
wise men of the Archeopagus should properly sit 1 The bench looks 
but an uncomfortable settle ! the floor of the court is a ridiculous little 
quadrangle of oak, like a pie-board \ the witness-box is so small that 
it seems capable of holding nothing but the shooting "Jack" of our 
toyshop experience ; and the jury-box has a strong family likeness to 
one of the defunct Smithfield sheep-pens, where sit the intelligent jury, 
who have an invincible propensity, be the weather hot or cold, for 
wiping their foreheads with blue cotton pocket handkerchiefs. A weary 
martyrdom some of those poor jurymen pass ; understanding a great 
deal more about the case on which they have to deliver at its com- 
mencement than at its termination ; bemused, bewildered, and dazzled 
by the rhetorical flourishes and ingenious sophistry of the counsel on 
both sides, and utterly nonplussed by the elaborately obscure pleas that 
are put in. But the usher has sworn them in that they " shall will 
and truly try " the matter before them ; and try it they must. To a 
man who has, perhaps, a matter of sixty or seventy thousand pounds at 
stake on the issue of a trial, the proceedings of most tribunals seem 
characterised by strange indifference, and an engaging, though, to the 
plaintiff and defendant, a somewhat irritating laisser alter. The attor- 
neys take snuff with one another, and whisper jokes. The counsel chat 
and poke each other in the ribs ; the briefless ones, in the high back 
rows, scribble caricatures on their blotting-pads, or pretend to pore over 
" faggot" briefs, or lounge from the Queen's Bench into the Exchequer, 
and from the Exchequer into the Bail Court, and so on and into the 
Common Pleas; the usher nods, and cries, " Silence," sleepily; the 
clerk reads in a droning monotonous voice documents of the most vital 
importance, letters that destroy and blast a life-long reputation of 
virtue and honour : letters that bring shame on noble women, and 
ridicule on distinguished men ; vows of affection, slanderous accusa- 
tions, outbursts of passion, anonymous denunciations, ebullitions of 
love, hatred, revenge. Some one is here, doubtless, to report the case 
for to-morrow's papers, but no active pens seem moving. The Chief has 
not assumed his legal harness yet; and the junior counsel employed in 
the case are bungling over their preliminaries. The faded moreen cur- 
tains ; the shabby royal arms above the judge, with their tarnished 
gilding, subdued-looking lion, and cracked unicorn ; the ink-stained, 
grease-worn desks and forms ; the lack-lustre, threadbare auditory, 



96 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




THE QUEEN S BENCH, AND THE QUEEN S BENCH PRISON. 9? 

with woe-be-gone garments and mien, who fill up the hinderpart of the 
auditory : though what they can want in the Court of Queen's Bench 
Heaven only knows j the bombazine-clad barristers, in their ill- 
powdered wigs — quite fail in impressing you with a sense of anything 
like grandeur or dignity. Yet you are in Banco Regina. Here our 
sovereign lady the Queen is supposed to sit herself in judgment ; and 
from this court emanates the Great Vv r rit of Right — the Habeas Corpus. 
To tell the truth, neither counsel, jury, nor audience seem to know or 
to care much about what is going on ; but there are three persons w T ho 
sit up aloft — not exactly sweet little cherubs, for they are very old, 
wrinkled men — who know the case like a book, and considerably better 
than many books ; who have weighed the pros and cons to the minutest 
hair's breath, to a feather's turn of the scale, who are awake and alive, 
alive ! to all the rhetorical flourishes and ingenious sophistry of the 
advocates, and who will tell the jury exactly what the case is made of 
in about a tithe of the time that the junior counsel would take in enu- 
merating wrongs of which the plaintiff complains, or whose commission 
the defendant denies. It is an edifying sight to watch the presiding 
judge— that shrivelled man in petticoats— with his plain scratch wig 
all awry. Now he hugs his arms within his capacious sleeves ; now he 
crosses his legs ; now, yes, now he twiddles his judicial thumbs ; now he 
nods his august head, allows it to recline over one shoulder, and seems 
on the point of falling off to sleep ; now he leans wearily, his cheek in 
his hand, his elbow on the bench, first on one side, then on the other; 
then he rises, shakes his old head, yawns, and, with his hands in his 
pockets, surveys the outer bar through gold-rimmed spectacles. He 
seems the most bored, the most indifferent spectator there : but only 
wait till the chiefs on both sides have concluded their eloquent bam- 
boozling of the jury; mark my Lord Owlett settle his wig and his 
petticoats then, sort and unfold the notes he has been lazily (so it 
seemed) scrawling from time to time, and in a piping, quavering voice, 
begin to read from them. You marvel at the force, the clarity, the 
perspicuity of the grand old man ; you stand abashed before the intel- 
lect, clear as crystal, at an age when man's mind as well as his body 
is oft-times but labour and sorrow ; you are astonished that so much 
vigour, so much shrewdness, so much eloquence, should exist in that 
w T orn and tottering casket. Goodness knows, I am not an optimist, 
and give but too much reason to be accused of nil admirari tendencies ; 
yet I cannot help thinking that if on this earth there exists a body of 



98 TWICE SOUND THE CLOCK. 

men grandly wise, generously eloquent, nobly impartial, and sternly 
incorruptible, those men are the judges of England. 

Come away though, now, Don Cleophas ; we must go further afield. 
The case that is "on" just now is not of sufficient interest to detain 
us ; though here is an episode sufficiently grotesque. An old lady is 
entitled to some damages, or to some verdict, or to some money or 
apology, or, at all events, something from somebody. My Lord Owlett 
suggests a compromise, and instructs counsel to ask her what she will 
take to settle matters. 

" What will you take V asks the gentleman in the bob-tailed wig 
of the old lady. 

Now the old lady is very deaf, and merely shakes her head at the 
counsel, informing the jury, in confidence, that she is " very hard o' 
hearin'." 

" His Lordship wants to know what you will take?" asks the 
counsel again ; this time bawling as loud as ever he can in the old 
lady's ear. 

" I thank his lordship kindly,'' the ancient dame answers stoutly ; 
" and if it's no illconwenience to him, Til take a little warm ale /" 

And, amid a roar of laughter from the spectators, we quit the 
Court of Queen's Bench. 

Nor must we linger, either, beneath William Rufus's carved roof- 
tree, so ingeniously heightened, and otherwise transmogrified, by Sir 
Charles Earry and his satellites. This is a different Westminster Hall 
to that which I knew in my childhood, just after the great fire of '34. 
There was no great stained glass window at the end then, no brazen 
Gothic candelabra, no golden House of Lords in the corridor beyond, 
where the eye is dazzled with the gilding, the frescoes, the scarlet 
benches and rich carpets, and where the Lord Hioh Chancellor sits on the 
woolsack, like an allegory of Themis in the midst of a blaze of fireworks. 
In my time, the keeper of her Majesty's conscience and the Great Seal sat 
in a panelled room, like a dissenting chapel. Let us hasten forth 
from the Great Hall, for it is full of memories. I spoke of famous 
footsteps on the Mall, St. James's ; how many thousand footsteps — 
thousands % — millions rather, have been lost here in fruitless pacing up 
and down ! Westminster Hall is always cool : well it may be so ; the 
dust was laid and the air refrigerated centuries since by the tears and 
the sighs of ruined suitors. What a wondrous place the old hall is ! 
what reminiscences it conjures up— they will not be laid in the Red 



THE QUEEN S BENCH, AND THE QUEEN S BENCH PRISON. 99 

Sea — of the gorgeous banquets of the Plantagenets, of the trials of 
Laud and Strafford, and of Laud and Strafford's master ; of Mr. Jona- 
than Wild's ancestor walking the hall with a straw in his shoe ; of 
poor little Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley, her husband, 
standing their trial here on a velvet-covered platform in the midst of 
the hall, for treason to Bloody Mary. Did they ever cut a state 
prisoner's head off in Westminster Hall, I wonder, as they did Mary 
Stuart's in the hall at Fotheringay ] The place is large enough. 

Once again I stand within the precincts of the Queen's Bench ; but 
where is my Lord Owlet t, where the bewigged barristers and the jury- 
box with the "twelve honest men" within wiping their semperper- 
spiring foreheads '? I am standing in the centre of a vast gravelled 
area, bounded on the south side by a brick wall of tremendous height, 
and crowned by those curious arrangements of geometrical spikes 
known as chevaax de frise. To the north there is a range of ordinary- 
looking houses, the numbers cf which are painted very conspicuously 
in white characters on a black ellipse above the doors, about which, 
moreover, there is this peculiarity, that they are always open. If you 
peep through the yawning portals, you will see that the staircases are 
of stone, and that the roofs of the rooms on the ground-floor are 
vaulted. There are no barred windows, no bolts, bars, or grim chains 
apparent, though from the back windows of these houses there is a 
pleasant prospect of another high wall, equally surmounted with 
chevaux de frise. When the spider has got the fly comfortably into his 
web, and has satisfied himself that he can't get out, I daresay that he 
does not take the trouble to handcuff him. In the midst of this 
gravelled area stands a pump, known as the " Dolphin ;" to the right 
of this institution, and somewhat in the back-ground, is a great square 
building, called the " State House." The rooms here are double the 
size to those in the houses I have alluded to, and are accorded by the 
governor of the place as a matter of favour to those inmates of the — 
well, the college — who can afford to fill them with a sufficient quantity 
of furniture. Close to the State House is a strong iron gateway, through 
which the guardians of the college have a strong disinclination to 
allow the under- graduates to pass, unless they be furnished with a 
certain mysterious document called "a discharge." The guardians 
themselves are ruddy men with very big keys ; but they seem on the 
very best terms with the gentlemen whose intended exercise outside 



100 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




THE QUEEN S BENCH, 

the walls they feel compelled (doubtless through solicitude for their 
precious health) to debar, and are continually bidding them " good 
morning'' in the most affable manner; it being also one of their 
idiosyncrasies to rub their noses with the handles of the big keys while 
going through the salutation. In days not very remote there were 
certain succursals, or chapels of ease, to the college, in the shape of 
dingy tenements in the borough of Southwark, extending as far as the 
Elephant and Castle ; and in these tenements, which were called the 
" Rules," such collegians as were in a position to offer a fantastic 
guarantee entitled a u Bail Bond/' were permitted to dwell, and 
thence they wrote letters to their friends and relations, stating that 
the iron was entering into their souls, and that they were languishing 
— well, never mind where — in college. These "rules" were abolished 
in the early years of her present Majesty's reign ; and at the same time 
a stern Secretary of State prohibited the renewal of a notable saturnalia 
called "a Mock Election," of which no less celebrated an artist than 
Haydon painted a picture (he was himself a collegian at the time), 
which was bought, for considerably more than it was worth, by King 
George IV. The saturnalia was fast falling into desuetude by itself ; 
but the Home Secretary also interfered to put a stop to the somewhat 
boisterous conviviality which had reigned among those collegians who 
had money, from time immemorial, and which had converted the 
Queen's Bench into a den of the most outrageous and disgraceful dissi- 
pation and revelry. Under the present not very stringent regulations 
(considering what a carcere duro is, the other alma mater of White- 
cross Street, to say nothing of the hideous place called Horsemonger 
Lane), the collegians are restricted to the consumption of one quart of 
beer — which they may have just as strong as ever they like — or one 
imperial pint of wine, per diem, at their option ; yet it is a very 
curious fact, that no collegian who was flush of cash was ever found to 
labour under any difficulty in providing sufficient refreshment for his 
friends when he gave a wine party in his room. The payment of rent 
is unknown in the college ; and it is but rarely that the time-honoured 
system of " chummage," or quartering two or more collegians in one 
room, and allowing the richest to pay his companions a stipulated sum 
to go out and find quarters elsewhere, is resorted to. As a rule, the 
collegian on his arrival, after spending one night in a vaulted apart- 
ment close to the entrance, and which bears a strong resemblance to 
the Gothic vault described in " Rookwood" — an apartment known as 



102 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

the " receiving ward" — lias allotted to him, by solemnly-written 
ticket, a whitewashed chamber of tolerable size, moderately haunted by 
mice, and " passably" infested by fleas. Straightway there starts up, 
as it were from the bowels of the earth, a corpulent female, rubicund 
in countenance, tumbled in garments, and profuse in compliments, 
assuring him that he is the very " Himage of the Markis of Scatter- 
brass, which his aunt let him oat by composing with his creditors," or 
" Capting Spurbox, of the Hoss Guards, as 'ad champagne hevery 
mornin', and went through the court payin' nothink/'f • She, for a 
small weekly stipend — say. five shillings — agrees to furnish your room ; 
and in an astonishingly short space of time you find the bare cube 
transformed into a sufficiently comfortable bed-room and sitting-room. 
For eighteenpence a week extra you may have a double green baize 
door with brass nails, like a verdant coffin, and white dimity curtains 
to your windows, with real tassels. In the train of thejstout tumbled 
female, there always follows a gaunt woman of no particular age, with 
ropy hair, a battered bonnet, and scanty garments apparently nailed 
to her angular form, who expresses, with many curtsies, her desire to 
" do for you." Don't be alarmed ; she simply means that for three or 
four shillings a week she will clean your room, boil your kettle, and 
bring up the dinner, which has been cooked for you in the common 
kitchen of the college. She, too, has an acolyte, a weazened old man 
in a smock frock and knee shorts (though I think that he must be 
dead or have left college by this time*) who for a shilling a week will 
make your boots shine like mirrors ; who resides here, and has resided 
here for many years, because he can't or won't pay thirty pounds, and 
who is reported to be worth a mint of money. So here the collegian 
lives, and makes as merry as he can under adverse circumstances. The 
same tender precautions adopted by the authorities of the college to 
prevent the unnecessary egress of those in statu pupillari, are enforced 
to preserve a due state of morality among them. There is a chapel, as 

* This old man's name was " Corney," at least I never knew him by any 
other appellation, He had been a collegian for years ; and being a Briton who 
" stood upon his rights," and was for " freedom of opinion," gave the governor 
an immense amount of trouble. I think one of the happiest days of Captain 
Hudson's life must have been the one on which " Corney" (who, it turned out, ought 
never to have heen imprisoned at all) got his discharge. He took lodgings imme- 
diately, I have heard, at a neighbouring coal shed, and brought an action (in forma 
pauperis) against the governor for false imprisonment, and wrongful detention of 
property, about once a fortnight. 



THE QUEENS BENCH, AND THE QUEENS BENCH PRISON. 103 

there is an infirmary, within the walls ; the lady collegians, of whom 
there is always a small number in hold ; are kept in jealous seclusion. 
Dicing and card-playing are strictly prohibited, and contumacious con- 
travention of the rules involves the probability of the recalcitrant 
student being immured in a locus penitentice called the " Strong 
Room." There he is kept for four and twenty hours, without tobacco. 
Horrible punishment ! This is in the college attached to her 
Majesty's Bench. Pshaw ! Why should I beat about the Bench, or the 
bush, any longer, or even endorse the quibble adopted by those col- 
legians who wish to have their letters addressed to them genteelly, 
of " No. 1, Belvidere Place ? '■ That which I have been describing: is a 
debtors' jail — the Queen's Prison, in fact. 

And what of the collegians — the prisoners— -themselves 1 It is ten 
o'clock in the morning, and they are sauntering about in every variety 
of shabby deshabille, smoking pipes after their meagre breakfasts, 
walking arm in arm with one another, or with friends who have come 
to see them, and whose ingress is permitted from nine a.m. until seven 
p.m. None are allowed to enter after that hour \ but those visitors 
already in are allowed to stop till nine in the evening. Some of the 
collegian prisoners, poor fellows, have women and little children with 
them, who are very silly and sentimental, in their illogical way ; but 
you may depend on it that, in nine out of ten of these groups,, the 
staple theme of conversation is the probability of the captive being 
" out next week." They are always going to be out next week, these 
caged birds ; but they die sometimes in the Bench, for all that. 

Don't you think, too, that it would be as graceful as expedient to 
draw a veil over these broken-down men % Even the felons in Penton- 
ville are allowed to wear masks in the exercise-yard. Why should I, 
whose sternest, strongest aim it is to draw from Life, and from the life 
only, but who wish to pluck the mote from no man's eye, to cast a 
stone at no glass house built on the pattern of mine own, expatiate in 
word-pictures upon the dilapidated dandies, the whilom dashing bucks 
in dressing-gowns out at elbows, and Turkish caps with tassels, set, 
with a woe-begone attempt at jaunty bearing, on one side, the decayed 
tradesmen, the uncertificated bankrupts, the cankers of a calm world 
and a long peace, that prowl and shuffle through the yards of a 
debtors' prison % Why, every man of the world has acquaintances, if 
not friends, there. Why, poor old Jack, who gave the champagne 
dinners we were so glad to be invited to, has been in the Bench for 



104 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

months. Yonder broken-winged butterfly, relapsing, quite against 
the order of nature, into a state of grubhood again, may have gone 
through his Humanities with the best of us, and may say Hodie mihi, 
eras tibL To-day he is in jail ; but to-morrow I, you, my brother 
the millionaire, may be taken in execution ; and who shall say that 
we shall have the two pounds twelve wherewith to purchase the habeas 
coiytts ? 



ELEVEN O'CLOCK A.M.— TROOPING THE GUARD, AND A 
MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE. 

I have the fortune, or misfortune, to live in a " quiet street," and am 
myself an essentially quiet man, loving to keep myself in the Queen's 
peace, and minding my own business, though devoutly wishing that 
people would not mind it for me in quite so irritating a degree. I 
sleep soundly when in health, and never question Mrs. Lillicrap's 
mystifying items in her weekly bill, of " mustard, vinegar, and 
mending," or " pepper, postage stamps, and mother- o'-pearl buttons." 
I never grumble at the crying of babies, remembering that a wise and 
good doctor once told me that those dear innocents pass the days of 
their nonage in a chronic state of stomach-ache and congestion of the 
brain, and console myself with that thought. I can even support, 
without much murmuring, the jangling of the pupils' piano at Miss 
Besom's establishment for young ladies, next door. Distance, and a 
party-wall, lend enchantment to the sound, and I set no more store by 
it than I do by the chirruping of the birds in the town-bred foliage 
at the extremity of Buckingham Street, or the puffing and snorting 
of the halfpenny steamboats at the "Fox-under- the-Hill." I am so 
quiet, that I can allow the family of a distant blood-relation to reside 
in the parlours for twelve months, without troubling myself about 
their health ; and I never yet rebelled at the perverse orthography of 
the washerwoman, who persists in spelling my half-hose thus : " Won 
pare sox ." When I die, I hope that they will lay me in a very quiet 
church-yard in Kent, that I know, where some one who cared for me 
has been mouldering away peacefully these four years, where the 



ELEVEN O'CLOCK A.M. — TBOOPIXG THE GUARD. 105 

cleryinan's blind white pony will browse upon the salad that I am 
eating by the roots ; where the children will come and have famous 
games — their silver voices and pattering feet upon the velvet turf make 
out a pleasant noise, I wot j and where they will write " Requiescat in 
pace " upon my gravestone ; if, indeed, I leave maravedis enough 
behind me for Mr. Farley to cut me an inscription withal. 

Yet, quiet as I am, I become at Eleven o'Clock in the Morning on 
every day of the week save Sunday a raving, ranting maniac — a 
dangerous lunatic, panting with insane desires to do, not only my self 
but other people, a mischief, and possessed, less by hallucination than 
by rabies. For so sure as the clock of St. Martin's strikes eleven, so 
sure does my quiet street become a pandemonium of discordant sounds. 
My teeth are on edge to think of them. The " musicianers," whose 
advent from Clerkenwell and the East-end of London I darkly hinted 
in a preceding chapter, begin to penetrate through the vaster thorough- 
fares, and make their hated appearance at the head of my street. 
First Italian organ-grinder, hirsute, sunburnt, and saucy, who grinds 
airs from the " Trovatore " six times over, follows with a selection 
from the li Traviata," repeated half a dozen times, finishes up with the 
" Old Hundredth " and the " Postman's Knock," and then begins 
again. Next, shivering Hindoo, his skin apparently just washed in 
walnut juice, with a voluminous turban, dirty white muslin caftan, 
w r orsted stockings and hob-nailed shoes, who, followed by two diminu- 
tive brown imps in similar costume, sings a dismal ditty in the 
Hindostanee language, and beats the tom-tom with fiendish monotony. 
Next comes a brazen woman in a Scotch cap, to which is fastened a 
bunch of rusty black feathers, apparently culled from a mourning 
coach past service. She wears a faded tartan kilt, fleshings, short 
calico trews, a velveteen jacket, tin buckles in her shoes, and two 
patches of red brick-dust on her haggard cheeks, and is supposed to 
represent a Scottish highlander. She dances an absurd fling, interpo- 
lated occasionally with a shrill howl to the music of some etiolated bag- 
pipes screeded by a shabby rogue of the male sex, her companion, 
arrayed in similar habiliments. Next come the acrobats — drum, 
clarionet, and all. You know what those nuisances are like, without 
any extended description on my part. Close on their heels follows the 
eloquent beggar, with his numerous destitute but scrupulously clean 
family, who has, of course, that morning parted with his last shirt. 
Then a lamentable woman with a baby begins to whimper " Old Dog 

H 



106 f TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Tray." Then swoop into the street an abominable band of ruffians, 
six in number. They are swarthy villains, dressed in the semblance of 
Italian goatherds, and are called, I believe, pifferari. They play upon 
a kind of bagpipes — a hideous pig-skin-and-walking-stick-looking 
affair, and accompany their droning by a succession of short yelps and 
a spasmodic pedal movement that would be a near approach, to a 
sailor's hornpipe, if it did bear a much closer resemblance to the war- 
dance of a wild Indian. Add to these the Jews crying "Go' ! " the 
man who sells hearthstones, and the woman who buys rabbit-skins, the 
butcher, the baker, and the boys screaming shrill Nigger melodies, and 
rattling pieces of slate between their ringers in imitation of the 
" bones," and you will be able to form an idea of the quietude of our 
street. From the infliction of the soot-and-grease-bedaubed and 
tambourine-and-banjo-equipped Ethiopian serenaders, we are indeed 
mercifully spared ; but enough remains to turn a respectable thorough- 
fare into a saturnalia. 

I can do nothing with these people. I shout, I threaten, I shake 
my fist, I objurgate them from my window in indifferent Italian, but to 
no avail. They defy, scorn, disregard, make light of me. They are 
encouraged in their abominable devices, not merely by the idlers in the 
street, the servant-maids gossiping at the doors, the boys with the 
baskets, and the nurse children, but by the people at the windows, who 
seem to hare nothing to do but to look from their casements all day long. 
There is an ancient party of the female persuasion opposite my humble 
dwelling, who was wont to take intense interest in the composition of 
my literary essays. She used to bring her work to the window at first ; 
but she never did a stitch, and soon allowed that flimsy pretext to fall 
through, and devoted herself with unaffected enjoyment to staring at 
me. As I am modest and nervous, I felt compelled to put a stop to this 
somewhat too persevering scrutiny ; but I disdained to adopt the pusil- 
lanimous and self-nose-amputating plan of pulling down the window 
blinds. I tried taking her portrait as she sat, like an elderly Jessica, 
at the casement, and drew horrifying caricatures of her in red chalk, 
holding them up, from time to time, for her inspection ; but she rather 
seemed to like this last process than otherwise ; and I was obliged to 
change my tactics. The constant use of a powerful double-barrelled 
Solomon's race-glass of gigantic dimensions was first successful in dis- 
composing her, and ultimately routed her with great moral slaughter ; 
and she now only approaches the window in a hurried and furtive 



ELEVEN O'CLOCK A.M. TROOPING THE GUARD. 107 

manner. I daresay she thinks my conduct most unhandsome. She 
and the tall man in the long moustaches at number thirteen, all the 
pupils at the ladies' school next door, the two saucy little minxes in 
black merino and worked collars at number nine, and that man with the 
bald head shaped like a Dutch cheese, in the parlour at number nine, 
who is always in his shirt sleeves, drums with his fingers on the window 
panes, and grins and makes faces at the passers-by, and whom I conscien- 
tiously believe to be a confirmed idiot, are all in a league against me, 
and have an alliance, offensive and defensive, with the musical canaille 
below. They cry out " Shame " when I remonstrate with those nuis- 
ances : they shout and jeer at me when I sally forth from the door, and 
make rabid rushes at the man with the bagpipes : they inquire derisively 
whether I consider myself lord of the creation] I am tempted — 
desperately tempted — to avail myself of my rights as a Civis Romanus, 
to summon the aid of the police, and to give one of the grinders, howlers, 
or droners in charge. Mr. Babbage, the arithmetician, does it ; why 
should not I % What progress can I make in " Twice Round the Clock " 
in the midst of this hideous din % But then I remember, with much 
inward trouble, that I have in public committed myself more than once 
in favour of street music — that I have laughed at the folly of putting- 
down bagpipes and barrel-organs by act of Parliament. I remember, 
too — I hope in all its force and Truth — a certain axiom, that the few 
must always suffer for the enjoyment of the many — that we are not all 
sages in decimals and logarithms — or people writing in books and 
newspapers — that the sick, the nervous, the fastidious, and the hypo- 
chondriacal, are but drops of water in a huge ocean of hale, hearty, some- 
what thick-skinned and thick-eared humanity, who like the noisy va- 
gabonds who are my bane and terror in the quiet street, and admire 
their distressing performances. Some men cannot endure a gaping pig ; 
to many persons the odour of all roots of the garlic family is intolerable. 
I hate cats. I had an aunt who said that she could not " abide " green 
as a colour. Yet we should not be justified, I think, in invoking the 
terrors of the legislature against roast pork, onions, cats, and green peas. 
Mr. Babbage must pursue his mathematical calculations in a study at 
the back of his house, and I must hie me to the Reading-room of the 
British Museum, or turn out for a stroll. 

And in this stroll, which, if the weather be fine, almost invariably 
leads towards one or other of the parks, I am frequently permitted to 
witness the imposing ceremony of " trooping the guard " in the Palace- 



108 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

yard, St. James's. Why her Majesty's Foot Guards should be " trooped" 
at eleven o'clock in the morning, and in what precise evolutions the 
operation of " trooping " consists, I am unable to state. Eleven o'clock, 
too, does not seem always a rigidly adhered-to hour; for, on the 
mornings of the days consecrated to our "Isthmian games," to the 
cosmopolitan Derby, and the more aristocratic, but equally attractive 
Ascot Cup, the time taken is nine instead of eleven, doubtless for the 
convenience of the heavy guardsmen, who, with heavy cigars protruding 
from their heavy moustaches, and heavy opera-glasses slung by their 
sides, go solemnly down to the races in heavy drags. 

To the uninitiated, " trooping the guard " appears to consist in some 
hundred and fifty grenadiers in full uniform, their drums and fifes and 
their brass band at their head, marching from the Horse Guards, across 
the parade ground, and along the Mall to the Palace-yard, where the 
Queen's colours are stuck into a hole in the centre, where the officer on 
guard salutes them, w r here the other officers chat in the middle of the 
quadrangle, and where officers and men, and a motley crowd of specta- 
tors, listen to the enlivening strains of the brass band playing selections 
from the popular operas of the day. No complicated manoeuvres seem 
to be performed; the automaton-like inspection of the " troops " takes 
place on the other side of the park ; and when the colours are firmly 
fixed, and left in charge of a sentry, the "troops" file off again, the 
officers repairing to their clubs, and the soldiers to their barracks, w r hile 
the brass bandsmen at once subside into private life, and become civilians 
of decidedly Cockney tendencies. 

Hungry men are said, sometimes, to lull the raging of their appetites 
by sniffing the hot, and, to some noses, fragrant breeze which is emitted 
from between the gratings of an eating-house. To some the contempla- 
tion of eel pies, smoking rounds of beef, rumpsteak pies, and pen'ortks 
of pudding, shining in the glory of dripping, and radiant with raisins, 
is almost as satisfying as the absolute possession of those dainties. It is 
certain that contented spirits do yet exist, by whom the sight of the 
riches and the happiness of others is accepted as a compensation for 
the wealth and the felicity which they do not themselves enjoy. It is a 
very pleasant mental condition, this — to be able to stare a pastrycook's 
window out of countenance, and partake of, in imagination, the rich 
plum-cakes, the raspberry-tarts, and the lobster-patties, without coveting 
those dainties; to walk up Regent Street, and wear, mentally, the 
" ducks of bonnets/' the Burnouse cloaks and the Llama shawls, which 






ELEVEN O'CLOCK A.M. — TROOPING THE GTIAHD. 109 




110 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

poverty forbids us to purchase ; to walk through the Vernon or 
Sheepshanks collections, and hang up the delightful Landseers, Websters, 
and Mulreadys in fantastic mind- chambers of our own ; to call Hampton 
Court and Windsor our palaces, and St. James's and the Green our 
parks j to fancy that the good people who have horses and carriages, 
and jewels, and silks, and satins, have but a copyhold interest in them, 
and that the fee-simple of all these fine things is in us. Such imagi- 
native optimists can sit down unmurmuringly to a Barmecide feast ; the 
iC Court Circular " pleases them as much as an invitation to the Queen's 
ball ; a criticism on "Lucrezia Borgia " at the opera delights them as 
much as an actual stall at Co vent Garden ; and Mr. Albert Smith's 
Egyptian Hall ascent of Mont Blanc, and his more recent Chinese 
entertainment, are to them quite as full of interest and adventure as 
a real pilgrimage to Chamouni, a toilsome scramble up the ''Grands 
Mulets," a sail in a sampan on the Canton river, or a "fightee 
pigeon " with the " Braves " in Hog Lane. 

The immortal young ladies who have been occupied in their eternal 
crochet-work any time since the siege of Troy, and who are called the 
Pates, have decided that it is better for me to be Alone. I am con- 
demned for life to soliloquise. None of the young women with whom 
I have (to adopt the term current in domestic service) "kept com- 
pany," would, in the end, have anything to do with me. They were 
very punctual in sending me cards — one sent me cake, but that was 
long ago — when they were married. One said I squinted, another 
that I was ill-tempered, and a third wondered at my impudence. Joan 
went off to Australia to join her cousin the digger, who, having done 
well at Bendigo, had written home for a wife, as he would for a Deans' 
revolver. Sarah married the linendraper (I am happy to state that he 
manifested himself stupid and ferocious, and went, commercially, to the 
dogs within six months after marriage) ; as for Rachel, she positively 
fell in love with the tailor who came to measure me for my wedding 
suit, and married him. A nursemaid with a perambulator nearly 
tripped me up the other day, and sitting in that infantile chariot was 
Rachel's eldest. Even the young lady who sold sardines at Stettin, and 
who, while I was waiting three years since for the ice to break up in 
the Baltic, undertook to teach me the prettiest German I ever heard in 
Deutschland, evinced a decided partiality for a certain baker with a 
Vandyke beard, who was a member of the Philharmonic Society of that 
town on the Oder, and at length jilted me for a trumpeter in a dragoon 



ELEVEN O CLOCK A.M. A MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIEE. Ill 

regiment, a burly knave in a striped and fringed uniform, all red and 
yellow, like a flamingo. The heartless conduct of the grocer's daughter 
towards me has already been recorded in print. So I am alone. Not 
repining, however, but taking pleasure in other people's children, with 
the additional consolation of not having their little frocks and peram- 
bulators to pay for, and passably content to sit on a mile-stone by the 
great roadside, and smoke the calumet of peace, watching the wain of 
life, with youth on the box and pleasure in the dickey, tear by, till the 
dust thrown up by the wheels has whitened my hair, and it shall be 
time enough to. think of a neat walking funeral for One. 

Now, do you understand why I alluded to the pleasures of imagina- 
tion in connection with the contemplation of cook-shops, pictures, and 
palaces ? Now, do you comprehend how a hopelessly solitary man — if 
you put a single grain of philosophic hackisch into that pacific calumet 
of his— can derive so much pleasure and contentment from the sight of 
other folk's weddings ? I say nothing of courtship, which, on the part 
of a third party, argues a certain amount of, perhaps, involuntary eaves- 
dropping and espionage, but which, when the boys and girls love each 
other sincerely, is as delightful a sight as the sorest of eyes, the sorest of 
hearts, could desire to witness. What pretty ways they have, those 
simple young " lovyers ! " what innocent prattlings and rompings, 
what charming quarrels and reconciliations ! Edward would dance with 
Miss Totterdown last night ; Clara flirted most shamefully with Wertha 
Bjornsjertnjoe, the Scandinavian poet, and Lady Walrus's last lion. 
"What confiding billings and cooings ! how supremely foolish they are ! 
and what an abhorrent thing is common-sense in love at all ! Won- 
drously like ostriches, too, are Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy. They hide 
their pretty heads in each other's bosoms, and fancy they are totally in- 
visible. They have codes of masonic telegraphy, as legible as Long 
Primer to the meanest understanding. I reckon among my friends a 
professor of photography in fashionable practice, and marvellous are the 
stories he has to tell of the by-play of love that takes place sometimes 
in his glass studio. For you see, when, in order to " focus " a young 
couple before him, he throws the curtain of the camera over his head, 
Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy are apt, in the sweet ignorance of love, to 
fancy that the operator can't see a bit what is going on ; so Jenny 
arranges Jemmy's hair, and gives the moustache a twist, and there is a 
sly kiss, and a squeeze, and a pressure of the foot or so, and a variety 
of harmless endearing blandishments, known to our American cousins 



112 TWICE BOXJND THE CLOCK. 

(who are great adepts at sweet-hearting) under the generic name of 
'•' conoodling," and all of which are faithfully transmitted through 
the lens, and neatly displayed in an inverted position on the field of 
the camera, to the edification of the discreet operator. Oh, you 
enamoured young men and women, you don't know that the eyes of 
domestic Europe are always fixed on you, and that your pretty 
simperings and whimperings form a drama which becomes the source 
of infinite amusement and delight to the philosophic bystanders. And 
is it not much better so, and that our lads and lasses should court in the 
simple, kindly Anglo-Saxon way, than that we should adopt foreign 
manners, and marry our wives, as in Prance, starched and prim from 
the convent or the boarding-school ] Away with your morose, sulky, 
icy, ceremonious courtships. The Shepherd in Virgil, the moralist 
said, grew acquainted w r ith Love, and found him a native of the rocks. 
But he did not dwell there in sulky solitude, I will be bound. The 
rock was most probably the Rocher de Cancale, where he sat and ate 
clinch truffee, and quaffed Chambertin, with his Psyche, in a new bonnet 
and cream-coloured gloves, by his side. And they went to the play 
afterwards, and had merry times of it, you may be sure. 

I am very fond of weddings, and, to abandon for a moment the 
egotism and engrossing self-sufficiency which so delightfully charac- 
terise my sex, I fancy that the sight of the solemnisation of matrimony 
has equal charms for that better part of creation, whose special vocation 
it is, under all circumstances, to be married and happy, but who are 
oft-times, alas ! as hopelessly celibate as the Trappist. One can scarcely 
go to a wedding without seeing some of these brave knights-errant, 
these preux chevalieres of womanhood, these uncloistered nuns, these 
hermits in a vale of wax lights and artificial flowers, clustering in the 
galleries, or furtively ensconced in pews near the altar. They are very 
liberal to the pew-openers, these kind old maids, and are always ready 
with smelling-bottles if there be any fainting going on. They take 
their part in the crying with praiseworthy perseverance, and echo the 
responses in heartrending sobs ; they press close to the bride as she 
comes down the aisle on the arm of her spouse, and eye her approv- 
ingly and the bridesmaids criticisingly ; then go home, the big Church 
Service tucked beneath their mantles — go home to the solitary mutton 
chop and bleak shining hearth, with the cut paper pattern grinning 
through the bars like a skeleton. There are some cynics who irre- 
verently call old maids " prancers," and others who, with positive 



ELEVEN O'CLOCK A.M. A MAURI AGE IN HIGH LIFE. IK 




114 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

brutality, accuse them of leading monkeys in a place which I would 
much rather not hear of, far less mention. They are, to be sure, some- 
what stiff and starched, have uncomfortable prejudices against even the 
moderate use of mild cigars, and persist in keeping hideous little dogs 
to snap at your ankles ; but how often would the contemptuous term 
" old maid," were its reality known, mean heroic self-sacrifice and self- 
denial — patience, fortitude, unrepining resignation ? No man, who 
is not a Caliban or Miserrimus, need remain, his life long, a bachelor. 
The Siamese twins married ; the living skeleton was crossed in love, 
but afterwards consoled himself with a corpulent widow; the hunch- 
backed Scarron found a beautiful woman to love and nurse him ; and 
General Tom Thumb turned benedict the other day. But how many 
women — young, fair, and accomplished, pure and good and wise — are 
doomed irrevocably to solitude and celibacy ! Every man knows such 
premature old maids ; sees among a family of blooming girls one who 
already wears the stigmata of old maidenhood. It chills the blood to 
see these hopeless cases, to see the women resign themselves to their fate 
with a sad meek smile— to come back, year after year, and find them 
still meek, smiling, but sad, confirmed old maids. It is ill for me, who 
dwell in quite a Crystal Palace of a glass house, to throw so much as a 
grain of sand at the windows opposite, but I cannot refrain from ser- 
monising my fellows on their self-conceited bachelorhood. What dul- 
lards were those writers in the " Times " newspaper about marriage 
and three hundred a year ! Did Adam and Eve have three halfpence 
a year when they married ? Has the world grown smaller 1 Are there 
no Australias, Americas, Indies ? Are there no such things as marry- 
ing on a pound a week in a top garret, and ending in a mansion in 
Belgrave Square 1 no such things as toil, energy, perseverance ? hus- 
band and wife cheering one another on, and in wealth at last pleasantly 
talking of the old times, the struggles and difficulties ? We hear a 
great deal now-a-days about people's " missions.'' The proper mission 
of men is to marry, and of women to bear children ; and those who are 
deterred from marriage in their degree (for we ought neither to expect 
nor to desire Squire B. to wed Pamela every day) by the hypocritical 
cant about " society" and " keeping up appearances," had much better 
send society to the dogs and appearances to the devil, and have nothing 
more to do with such miserable sophistries. 

This diatribe, which I sincerely hope will increase the sale of 
wedding-rings in the goldsmiths' shops forty-fold, brings me naturally 



ELEVEN O CLOCK A.M. A MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIEE. 115 

to the subject of the second cartoon, by which the ingenious artist who 
transcribes my inky men and women into flesh and blood, has chosen to 
illustrate the hour of eleven o'clock in the morning. Here we are at a 
fashionable wedding at St. James's Church, Piccadilly. 

If I had the tongue or pen of Mr. Penguin, the urbane and aristo- 
cratic correspondent of the " Morning Post," I should give you quite a 
vivid, and at the same time a refined, description of that edifying spec- 
tacle — a marriage in high life. How eloquent^ and, by turn, pathetic 
and humorous, I could be on the bevy of youthful bridesmaids — all in 
white tulle over pink glace silk, all in bonnets trimmed with white 
roses, and with bouquets of camelias and lilies of the valley ! How I 
could expatiate, likewise, on the appearance of the beauteous and high- 
born bride, her Honiton lace veil, her innumerable flounces ; and her 
noble parents, and the gallant and distinguished bridegroom, in fawn- 
coloured inexpressibles and a cream-coloured face ; and his "best man," 
the burly colonel of the Fazimanagghur Irregulars ; and the crowd of 
distinguished personages who alight from their carriages at the little 
wicket in Piccadilly, and pass along the great area amid the cheers of 
the little boys ! They are all so noble and distinguished, that one 
clergyman can't perform the ceremony, and extra parsons are provided 
like extra oil-lamps on a gala night at Cremorne. The register becomes 
an autograph-book of noble and illustrious signatures ; the vestry-room 
has sweet odours of Jocky Club and Frangipani lingering about it for 
hours afterwards ; the pew-opener picks up white satin favours tied 
with silver twist. A white rose, broken short off at the stem, lies 
unregarded on the altar-steps; and just within the rails are some 
orange-blossoms from the bride's coronal. For they fall and die, the 
blossoms, as well as the brown October leaves. Spring has its death as 
well as autumn : a death followed often by no summer, but by cold and 
cruel winter. The blossoms fall and die, and the paths by the haw- 
thorn hedges are strewn with their bright corses. The blossoms droop 
and die : the little children die, and the green velvet of the cemetery is 
dotted with tiny grave-stones. 

See, the bridal procession comes into garish Piccadilly, and, amid 
fresh cheers and the pealing of the joy-bells, steps into its carriages. 

"Happy, happy, happy pair! 
None but the brave, 
None but the brave, 
None but the brave, deserve the fair." 



110 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

So sings Mr. John Dryden, whilom poet laureate. Let us hope that 
the brides of St. James's are all as fair as the bridegrooms are brave, 
and that they all commence a career of happiness by that momentous 
plunge into the waters of matrimony at eleven o'clock in the morning. 
With which sincere aspiration, I will clap an extinguisher on the 
Hymeneal torch, which I have temporarily lighted, and so to read the 
births, marriages, and deaths in the " Times." 



NOON.— THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION-HOUSE, 
AND THE "BAY TREE." 

The red- whiskered, quick-tempered gentleman, who carried the shiny 
leather bag and the bundle of sticks — umbrella and fishing-rods tied 
together like the fasces of a Roman lictor — and who wore a cloak grace- 
fully over his forty-shilling suit of heather tweed, "thoroughly well 
shrunk," the gentleman who, at Morley's Hotel, Trafalgar Square, and 
at twenty minutes before twelve, engaged a Hansom cabman, No. 9,009, 
and bade him drive "like anything" (but he said like something 
which I decline to mention) to the London Bridge Terminus of the 
South-Eastern Railway, has thrust his bundle of sticks, &c, through 
the little trap-door in the cabriolet's roof, and has savagely ordered the 
driver to stop, or to drive him to Jericho, or to the deuce. But the 
high-towering Jehu of 9,009 cannot drive to the dominions of the 
deuce, even as did " Ben," that famous Jarvey of the olden time, im- 
mortalised in the ballad of " Tamaroo." He can drive neither to the 
right nor to the left, nor backwards nor forwards ; for he is hemmed 
in, and blocked up, and jammed together in the middle of the Poultry ; 
and just as a sarcastic saloon omnibus driver behind jeeringly bids him 
" keep moving," accompanying the behest by the aggressive taunt of 
"gardner;" and just as the charioteer of the mail-cart in front affec- 
tionately recommends him not to be in a hurry, lest he should injure 
his precious health, Twelve o'Clock is proclaimed by the clock of St. 
Mildred's, Poultry ; and cabman 9,009 has lost his promised extra 
shilling for extra speed, and the red-whiskered gentleman has lost his 



XOON. THE JUSTICE-BOOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE. 117 

temper, and the train into the bargain, and there will be weeping at 
Tunbridge Wells this afternoon, where a young lady, with long ringlets 
and a white muslin jacket, will mourn for her Theodore, and will not 
be comforted — till the nest train arrives. 

It is noon, high noon, in the City of London. Why did not the in- 
cautious cabman drive down Cannon Street, the broad and unimpeded? 
or why did he not seek his destination by crossing Waterloo Bridge — 
he of the red whiskers would have paid the toll cheerfully — and tread 
the mazes of Union Street, Borough? Perhaps he was an inexperienced 
cabman, new to its daedalian ways. Perhaps he was a prejudiced and 
conservative cabman, adhering to the old Poultry as the corporation 
adhered to the old Srnithfield, and detesting newfangled thoroughfares. 
Perhaps he was a misanthropic cabman, whose chief delight was to 
make travellers lose trains. If such be the case, he has his wicked will 
now ; and the red-whiskered gentleman, sulkily alighting, scowlingly 
pays him his legal fare, leaves him grumbling, and retires himself 
moodily muttering, conscious that he has nearly two hours before him 
through which to kick his heels, and not knowing what on earth to do 
with himself. Be of good cheer, red- whiskered, shipwrecked one. 
Comfort ye, for I am here, the wanderer of the clock-face, and the 
dweller on the threshold of time. I will show you brave sights, and 
make your heart dance with mulligatawny soup and Amontillado sheny 
at the " Cock," in Threadneedle Street. You are not hungry yet I 
Well, we will stroll into the Stereoscopic Company's magnificent em- 
porium in Cheapside, and mock our seven senses with the delusions of 
that delightful toy, which, if Sir David Brewster didn't invent, he 
should properly have invented. You care not for the arts ? Shall we 
cross by King Street, and have a stare at Guildhall, with Gog and 
IVIagog, and the monument that commemorates Beckford's stern resolve 
to " stand no nonsense" from George III.? Or we may stroll into 
Garraway's, and mark how the sale of sandwiches and sherry-cobblers 
may be combined with the transfer of land and the vending of freehold 
houses. There is the auction-mart, too, if you have a fancy to see 
Simony sales by auction, and advowsons of the cures of immortal souls 
knocked down for so many pounds sterling. There is the rotunda of 
the Bank of England, with its many-slamming, zinc-plated doors, and 
its steps and flags worn away by the boots of the ever-busy stockbrokers, 
We will not go into the Dividend Office, for I have no dividends to 
draw now, and the sight makes me sad j neither will we enter the 



118 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Great Hall where William the Third's statue is (prettily noticed by 
Mr. Addison in a full-bottom-wigged allegory in the " Spectator "), and 
where the urbane clerks are for ever honouring the claims upon the old 
lady in Threadneedle Street ; giving il notes for gold " and " gold for 
notes.' ' We will not enter, because we don't want any change just 
now ; and one of the Brothers Forrester, who is sure to be hovering 
about the court-yard, in conversation with yonder cock-hatted beadle 
in blazing scarlet, might think we came for gold or notes that didn't 
belong to us. The Bullion Office we cannot visit, for we haven't an 
order of admission; and there is one place especially, rubicund- 
headed traveller, where we will be exceedingly cautious not to show 
our faces. That place is the interior of the Stock Exchange. I am 
not a " lame duck ; " I never, to my knowledge, " waddled ; " I never 
attempted to pry into the secrets of the " bulls " and the " bears ; " my 
knowledge of stockjobbing is confined to the fact that I once became 
possessed, I scarcely know how, only that I paid for them, of fifty 
shares in a phantom gold-mining company ; that I sold them, half an 
hour afterwards, at half-a-crown premium to a mysterious man in a 
dark room, up a court off Cornhill, who to every human being who en- 
tered his lair handed a long list covered with cabalistic figures, with the 
remark that it was " very warm," and which — the list, not the weather 
— I believe contained the current prices of stocks, though it might 
have related to the market value of elephants, for aught I knew ; that 
I pocketed the fifty half-crowns, and that I have never heard anything 
of the phantom company from that day to this. Vice-Chancellor 
somebody will be down upon me some day as a u contributory/ 7 I 
suppose, and I shall be delivered over to the tormentors ; but, mean- 
while, T. will tell you why I won't take my red- whiskered friend into 
the Stock Exchange — why I should like mine enemy to go there as 
soon as convenient. I have heard such horrible stories of the tortures 
inflicted by the members of the "House," upon unwary strangers who 
have strayed within its precincts ; of the savage cries of " two hundred 
and one," the shrieks, the yells, the whistles, and the groans; the 
dancing round the captive, the covering him with flour, the treading on 
his miserable toes, the buffeting of his wretched ears, the upripping of 
his unhappy coat-collar, and chalking of his luckless back ; the a bon- 
neting," the " ballooning," and the generally fiendish cruelties which 
intruders upon the speculators for the " account" have to suffer, that 
I would sooner venture without permission behind the scenes of a w r ell- 



NOON. THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE. 119 

regulated theatre, or attempt to beard the lion in his den, or walk up, 
unannounced, into the sanctum of the editor of the " Times " newspaper, 
or pay a morning call in a Choctaw wigwam, myself being a Pawnee or 
a Sioux, at war with my friends the G.'s, or pass through Portugal 
Street, Cursitor Street, or Chancery Lane, at any hour of the day or 
night, if my affairs should happen to embarrassed, than trust myself 
to the tender mercies of the members of the Stock Exchange. The}' 
are the staunchest and most consistent of Conservatives. 

Whither, then, away ! Why, bless me, how stupid I have been ! 
The Mansion House police-court opens at noon precisely, and we may 
enjoy, gratuitously, the sight of the Corporation Cadi, the Caesar of 
Charlotte Row, the great Lord Mayor of London himself, dispensing 
justice to all comers. By the way, I wish his Lordship would render 
unto us one little modicum of justice, combined with equity, by ridding 
us of the intolerable swarm of ragged, disgusting-looking juvenile 
beggars, who beset pedestrians at the doors of Messrs. Smith, Payne, 
and Smith's banking-house, and of the scarcely less intolerable im- 
portunities of the omnibus cads who are wrestling for old ladies and 
young children on the very threshold of the Mansion House. Here 
we are at the Municipal Hall of London's JEdiles ; architecture grand 
but somewhat gloomily florid, like George the First, say, in a passion, 
his bulbous Hanoverian jaw flaming from his perturbed perriwig- — 
glowering, half-angry, half-frightened, as he tears his embroidered coat- 
tail from the grasp of Lady Nithsdale, and obstinately refuses pardon 
for that poor Jacobite lord yonder cooped up in the gloomy Tower 
under sentence of death, but who, thanks to his wife's all- womanly 
devotion (well did Madame de Lavallete imitate her bright example to 
save her chivalrous husband just one hundred years afterwards), will 
cheat the headsman's axe and George's Hanoverian malice yet. The 
attic storey was evidently clapped on as an afterthought, and threatens 
to tumble over on to the portico ; the whole is profusely ornamented, 
like everything civic, and reminds me generally of a freestone model of 
the Lord Mayor's state carriage, squared in the Corinthian manner, and 
the gilt gingerbread well covered with smoke and soot. 

Not by that door in the basement will we enter, which is flanked 
by announcements relative to charity dinners, and youths who have 
absconded from their friends. Within that eternally-gaslit office is the 
place of business of the Eumenides of finance, whose grim duty it is 
to pursue forgers and bank-robbers through the world. There dwell, 



120 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

for thief-catching purposes, the terrible Forresters. Not by that door 
in Charlotte Row. Don't you see the handsome carriage, with the fat, 
brown, gaudily harnessed horses drawn up before it, and the superb 
powdered footmen sucking their bamboo-cane tops ? How odd it is 
that you can always tell the difference between a footman appertaining 
to one of the high civic dignitaries, and the flunkey of a real patrician. 
The liveries, on a drawing-room day, for instance, are equally rich, 
equally extravagant in decoration, and absurd in fashion ; both 
servitors sport equally large cocked-hats, equally long canes, and have 
an equal amount of powder dredged over their heads ; yet, on either 
flunkey's brow are the stigmata " East " or "West" of Temple Bar, 
stamped as legibly as the brand of Cain. The door in Charlotte Row 
is his Lordship's private entrance ; and her Ladyship is very probably 
at this moment preparing to go out for an airing. Not by that other 
lateral door in George Street — that low-browed, forbidding-looking 
portal. That is the prisoners' entrance. There the grim cellular van 
brings and waits for the victims of Themis. There it sets down and 
takes up, if not the chief actors, at least those who are most deeply 
interested in the moving drama which is every day enacted in the 
police tribunal of the Mansion House. 

So — up this broad, roomy flight of granite steps on the Lombard 
Street side of the Mansion House frontage — on through a double 
barrier of swing-doors at the corresponding angle beneath the portico ; 
and in less time than it would take to accept a bill (an operation in 
comparison to the celerity of which a pig's whisper is an age, and the 
pronunciation of the mystic words " Jack Robinson " a life-long task), 
we are within the sanctuary of municipal justice. The first thing that 
strikes the stranger, accustomed as he may be to frequenting other 
police-courts, is the unwonted courtesy of the officials, and their 
gorgeous costumes. About Bow Street, Lambeth, Westminster, there 
hangs an indefinable but pervading miasma of meanness and squalor. 
A settled mildew seems to infest the walls and ceiling, a chronic dust 
to mantle the furniture and flooring. No one connected with the 
court, officially or otherwise, with the single exception of the Magis- 
trate — who, always smug and clean shaven, and in a checked morning 
neckerchief and a high shirt collar, looks like a judicial edition of 
Major Pendennis — seems to have had his clothes brushed for a week 
or his boots blacked for a month. A dreadful jail-bird odour ascends 
from the ill-favoured auditory. The policemen are shabby in attire 



NOON. — THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE. 121 




122 TWICE BOTJ^D THE CLOCK. 

and morose in manner. The buckles of their belts are dull, and their 
buttons tarnished. They hustle you hither and thither, and order 
you in or out in a manner most distressing to your nerves ; and the 
gloomy usher thrusts a ragged Testament into your hands, and swears 
you as though he were swearing at you. But at the Mansion House 
there is a bluff, easy-going, turtie-and-venison-fed politeness generally 
manifest. You enter and you emerge from the court without being 
elbowed or shoved. The city policemen are more substantial-looking, 
well to do, and better natured men than their metropolitan confreres. 
Some of them have the appearance of small freeholders, and others, I 
am sure, have snug sums in the savings' banks. As to the jailers, 
ushers, court-keepers, warrant-officers, marshalmen, and other multi- 
farious hangers-on of civic justice, they are mostly men of mature age, 
rosy, bald and white-headed sages, who remember Sir John Key and 
the great Sir Claudius Hunter, and mind the time when Mr. Alderman 
Wood rode on horseback at the side of Queen Caroline's hearse, on the 
occasion of the passage of that injured lady's funeral procession through 
the city. As to their attire, it is positively — if I may be allowed the 
use of a barbarism — " splendiferous." Stout broadcloth, bright gilt 
buttons, with elaborate chasings of civic heraldry, scarlet collars, w r ith 
deep gold lace ; none of your paltry blue blanketing, horn buttons, and 
worsted gloves. No doubt, when in full uniform, the " splendiferous " 
functionaries all wear cocked-hats. Maybe, feathers. There is one 
weazened creature who flits in and out of a side door, to the left of 
the Lord Mayor's chair, and is perpetually handing up printed forms to 
his Lordship or to the chief clerk. I don't know exactly what he is, 
whether the Lord Mayor's butler, or the sword-bearer's uncle, or the 
city-marshal's grandfather, or the water-bailiff's son-in-law ; but the 
front of his coat is profusely ornamented with bars of gold braid, like 
pokers from Croesus's kitchen, and on his shoulders he wears a pair of 
state epaulettes, the which give him somewhat of a military appear- 
ance, and, contrasting with his civilian spectacles and white neckcloth, 
would produce an effect positively sublime if it were not irresistibly 
ludicrous. The home of Beadledom — its last home, I am afraid, after 
the exhaustion of the Windsor uniform, and that of the Elder 
Brethren of the Trinity House — will be at the Mansion House. 

The architect who has contrived the new Justice-room in this stately 
edifice must have been, if not a man of genius, at least one of original 
conceptions. The old police-court— -sacred to the manes of Mr. 



NOON. — THE JUSTICE-ROOX AT THE MANSION HOUSE. 123 

Hobler — was simply a Cave of Troplionius and Den of Despair 
There was no light in it — " only darkness visible ; " and when you 
peered at the misty prisoner in the dock, you were always reminded 
of Captain ]\Iacheath in his cell, when the inhuman Mr. Lockit 
wouldn't allow him any more candles, and threatened to clap on extra 
fetters in default of an immediate supply on the captain's part of 
"garnish" or jail fees. But the Palladio who has arisen to remedy 
these defects has contrived to introduce a considerable amount of li^ht 
—only it labours under the trifling disadvantage of being all in the 
wrong place. The Lord Mayor, with his back to the window, sits in a 
reflected light, just as does Wilkie's portrait of the Duke of York; 
and the fine effect of the city arms carved on his chair, to say nothing 
of his Lordship's gold chain and furred robe, is thereby totally lost. 
Mr. Goodman and the clerks, who are all very gentlemanly-looking 
individuals, much given to all -round collars and parting their hair 
down the middle, fill up commitments and make out summonses in a 
puzzling haze of chiaro oscuro ; the reporters are compelled to pore 
over their " Times " with their noses close to the paper (for no one 
ever saw a police reporter do anything save read the newspaper, though 
we are sure to read a verbatim narrative of the case in which we are 
interested next day), and the general audience is lost in a Cimmerian 
gloom. To make amends, there is plenty of light on the ceiling, and 
some liberal patches of it on the walls, and a generous distribution of 
its bounty on the bald heads, golden epaulettes, and scarlet collars of 
the marshalmen. We can't have everything we want, not even in the 
w r ay of Light. Let us be thankful that there is some of it about, even 
as it behoves us to be exceedingly grateful that there is such a vast 
amount of wealth in the world. Other people possess it — only, we don't. 

This, then, is the justice-room of the Mansion House. I have not 
given you, seriatim, a George Robins's catalogue of its contents, but by 
bits and bits I trust you will have been enabled to form a tolerably 
correct mind-picture of its contents. My Lord Mayor in the chair, 
clerks before him, reporters to the right, marshalmen left ; spectacled 
official at the desk in the left-hand corner— the summoning officer, I 
think — audience not too tightly packed into a neat pen at the 
back of the court ; dock 'in the centre, and the prisoner — Ah ! the 
prisoner ! 

Did it never strike you, in a criminal court of assize — "the judges 
all ranged, a terrible show," the solemn clerk of the arraigns gazing 



124 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

over the indictment, the spectators almost breathless with excited 
curiosity, rays from opera glasses refracted from the gallery, Pvegent 
Street bonnets and artificial flowers relieving the dark mass of the men- 
folk's dress, the bar bevvigged, the eloquent advocate for the defence 
thundering forth genteel philippics against the eloquent counsel for the 
prosecution — did it never strike you, I say, what a terrible fuss and 
bother, and calling on Jupiter to lift a wagon wheel out of a rut, what 
a waste of words, and show, and ceremonial all this became, when its 
object, the End to all these imposing means, was one miserable creature 
in the dock, with spikes, and rue, and rosemary before him, accused of 
having purloined a quart pot ? As for the prisoner who is this day 
arraigned before the mighty Lord Mayor — but first stand on tiptoe. 
There he is, God help him and us all ! a miserable, weazened, ragged, 
unkempt child, whose head, the police reports will tell us to-morrow, 
" scarcely reached to the railing of the dock." He has been caught 
picking pockets. It is not his first, his second, his third offence. He 
is an incorrigible thief. The great Lord Mayor tells him so with a 
shake of his fine head of hair. He must go to jail. To jail with him. 
He has been there before. It is the only home he ever had. It is his 
preparatory school for the hulks. The jail nursing-mother to thousands, 
and not so stony-hearted a step-mother as the streets. He is nobody's 
child, nobody save the police knows anything about him, he lives 
nowhere ; but in the eyes of the law he is somebody. He is a figure 
in a tabular statement, a neat item to finish a column in a report, 
withal. He is somebody to Colonel Jebb and Mr. Capper of the 
Home Office, and, in the end, the Ordinary of Newgate, the sheriffs, 
and, especially, somebody to Calcraft. He is somebody to whip, 
somebody to put to the crank, and into " punishment jackets," and to 
" deprive of his bed and gas," and gag, and drench with water, and 
choke with salt, and otherwise torture a la mode de Birmingham 
(Austin's improved method), somebody to build castellated jails for, 
somebody to transport, somebody to hang. 

There are reformatories, you say, for such as these. Yes, those admir- 
able institutions do exist ; but do you know, easily-satisfied optimist! 
that police magistrates every day deplore that reformatories, niggardly 
subsidised by a State grudging in every thing but jails, and gyves, and 
gibbets, are nine tenths of them full, and can receive no more inmates, 
even though recommended to them by " the proper authorities V But 
the streets are fuller still of strayed lambs, and though wolves devour 



X00X. — THE JTXSTICE-KOOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE. 12o 

them by the score each day, the tainted flock of lost ones still increases 

and increases. 

I must tell you, that before the "case of wipes," as an irreverent 

bystander called the proces of the pickpocket, was gone into (a good- 
for-nothing rascal that filou : deservedly punished, of course), what are 
called the night charges were disposed of. As I shall have something 
to say of the manners and customs of these night charges at another 
hour in the morning and in another place, I will content myself with 
j.mforming you now, that a blue bonnet and black silk velvet mantle, 
charged with being drunk and disorderly in Cheapside the night before, 
were set at liberty without pecuniary mulct, it being her, or their, first 
offence ; but a white hat with a black band, surmounting a rough coat, 
cord trousers, and Balbriggan boots, who had fought four omnibus con- 
ductors, broken eighteen panes of glass, demolished sundry waiters, and 
seriously damaged the beadle of the Royal Exchange (off duty, and 
enjoying the dulce deripere in loco in the shape of cold whiskey-and- 
water in a shady tavern somewhere up a court of the Poultry) — all in 
consequence of their (or his) refusal to pay for a bottle of soda-water, 
was fined in heavy sums — the aggregate cost of his whistle being about 
six pounds. The white hat was very penitent, and looked (the face 
under it likewise) very haggard and tired, and, in addition to his, or its, 
or their penalty, munificently contributed half a sovereign to the poor 
box. My Lord Mayor was severe but paternal, and hoped with benignant 
austerity that he might never see the white hat there again ; in which 
hope, and on his part, I daresay the white hat most cordially joined. 

I never could make out what they are always doing with paupers at 
the Mansion House. I never pay his Lordship a visit without finding 
a bevy of the poor things pottering about in a corner under the care of 
some workhouse official, and being ultimately called up to be exorcised 
or excommunicated, or, at all events, to have something done to them, 
under the New Poor Law Act. This morning there are at least a 
dozen of them, forlorn, decrepit, shame-faced, little old men, cowering 
and shivering, although the day is warm enough, in their uncomfort- 
able-looking gray suits. Pauper females seem to be at a discount at 
the Mansion House, save when, brazen-faced, blear-eyed, and dishevelled, 
they are dragged in droves to the bar to be committed to Hollo way 
prison, for a month's hard labour, for shivering innumerable panes of 
glass, throwing cataracts of gruel about, and expressing an earnest 
desire to lacerate with sharp cutlery the abdominal economy of the 



126 TWICE EOUO THE CLOCK. 

master of the City of London Union. Of incarnations of male impecu- 
niosity, there is a lamentable plenty and to spare. 

The pickpocket is succeeded by a distinguished burglar, well known 
in political — I beg pardon, in police — circles. There is no absolute 
charge of felony against him at present, and the only cause for his 
appearance to-day is his having been unfortunate enough to fall in with 
an acquaintance, who knew him by sight, in the shape of a city police- 
constable, who forthwith took him into custody for roaming about with 
intent to commit a felony. My Lord having heard a brief biographical 
sketch of his career, and being satisfied that he is a " man of mark" in 
a felonious point of view, sends him to Holloway for three months, 
which, considering that the fellow has committed, this time, at least, no 
absolute crime, seems, at the first blush, something very like a gross 
perversion of justice, and an unwarrantable interference with the liberty 
of the subject. When subsequently, however, I gather that a few in- 
considerable trifles, such as a " jemmy," a bunch of skeleton keys, a 
"knuckle duster,*' and a piece of wax candle, ail articles sufficiently 
indicative of the housebreaker's stock-in-trade, have been found in his 
possession, I cease to quarrel with the decision, and confess that my 
burglarious friend's incarceration, if not in strict accordance with law, 
is based on very sound principles of equity. After the housebreaker, 
there are two beggar women and a troop of ragged children — twenty- 
one days ; and a most pitiable sight to see and hear — beggar woman, 
children, and sentence, and their state of life into which it has not 
pleased Heaven to call, but cruel and perverse man to send them. Then 
an Irish tailor w 7 ho has had a slight dispute with his wife the night 
before, and has corporeally chastised her with a hot goose— -a tailor's 
goose, be it understood — to the extent of all but fracturing her skull. 
He is sent for four months' hard labour, which is rather a pleasurable 
thing to hear, although I should derive infinitely more delectation from 
the sentence if it included a sound thrashing. 

But, holloa ! we have been here three-quarters of an hour, and it is 
close upon one o'clock. Come, my red- whiskered friend, I think w r e 
have had enough of the Mansion House Justice-room. Let us make a 
bow to his Lordship, and evaporate. You want some lunch, you say — 
you are hungry now j well, let us go and lunch accordingly ; but where 1 
I mentioned Garraway's and the Cock. There is the Anti-Gallican, 
famous for soups. There is Birch's, with real turtle, fit for Olympian 
deities to regale upon. There is Joe's in Finch Lane, if you feel dis- 



NOON. THE JUSTICE-EOO}! AT THE MANSION HOUSE. 127 

posed for chop or steak, sausage or bacon, and like to see it cooked 
yourself on a Brobdignagian gridiron. No : you want something sim- 
ple, something immediate ; well, then, let us go to the Bay Tree. 

I never knew exactly the name of the street in which the Bay Tree 
is situated. I know you go down a narrow lane, and that you will 
suddenly come upon it, as a jack-in-the-box suddenly comes upon you. 
The first time I was taken there was by a friend, who, just prior to 
our arrival at the house of refection, took me up a dark entry, showed 
me a small court-yard, and, at its extremity, a handsome-looking stone 
building. That is Rothschild' 's, he said, and I thought I should have 
fainted. I am not a City man, and when I come eastward, it is merely 
(of course) to make a morning call on my friend the Governor of the 
Bank of England, or the Secretary for India for the time being, at his 
palace in Leadenhall Street, When I travel in foreign parts, my 
brougham (of course) takes me to the London Bridge Terminus. 
Authors never come into the City now-a-days, save to visit their bankers 
or their publishers. Authors ride blood horses, dine with dukes, and 
earn ten thousand a year. Such, at least, is the amount of their income 
surmised to be by the Commissioners of Income Tax, when they assess 
them arbitrarily and at such a figure their opposing creditors declare 
their revenue should be estimated, when they petition the Court for the 
Belief of Insolvent Debtors. 

I never sat down in the Bay Tree ; though its premises include, I 
believe, vast apartments for smoking and punch-bibbing purposes. I 
never looked one of the innumerable assistants (are they barmen or 
barmaids V) in the face. I was always in such a hurry. All I know 
of the establishment is, that it is a capital place to lunch at, and that 
everything is very excellent and very cheap ; and that the thousands 
who resort to it between eleven and three, always seem to be in as 
desperate a hurry as I am. 



128 TWICE EOUXD THE CLOCK. 



ONE P.M.— DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON. 

This modest series of papers brought me, at the time of their com- 
position, into great trouble, which was very nearly resulting in my 
complete discomfiture. Perhaps the severest of my trials was having 
to write the book at all, possessing, as is my misfortune, of course, a 
constitutional disinclination for the avocation to which I have devoted 
myself (as a gagne pain, or bread-winning mean). I didn't so much 
mind the ladies and gentlemen, who, since the commencement of the 
periodical in which these articles were originally published — ladies and 
gentlemen personally quite unknown to me — who overwhelmed me with 
correspondence ; some denouncing, others upbraiding, many ridiculing, 
and a few — a very few — eulogising yours to command. I didn't so 
much object to the attentions of those professional begging-letter 
writers, who are good enough to include authors in their list of possible 
contributaries, and who were profuse lately in passionate appeals (in 
bold, clerkly hands) for pecuniary assistance ; for though, like Bardolph, 
I have nothing, and cannot even coin my nose for guineas, or my blood 
for drachmas, it is not the less flattering to a man's minor vanities to 
receive a begging letter. I can imagine an old pauper out for a holiday, 
coming home to the workhouse, quite elated at having been accosted in 
the street by a mendicant, and asked for a halfpenny. I could bear 
with equanimity — nay, could afford to smile at — the people who went 
about saying things (who are the people who go about saying things, I 
wonder ! ) who ingeniously circulated reports that I was dead ; that I 
wrote these papers under a pseudonym ; that they were plagiarisms from 
some others written twenty years ago ; and that I never wrote them at 
all. I disregarded such insinuations serenely ; for who among us is 
exempt from such bald chat ? The very stupidest have their Bos wells 
- — the very meanest have those to envy them, as well as the Great and 
Learned ! There are people at this very moment, who are going 
about saying that Jones has pawned his plate, that the bailiffs are 
in Thompson's country house, that Robinson has written himself 
out, that Brown has run away with Jenkins's wife, that Muggins 



ONE P.M. DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON. 129 

has taken to brandy-and-water, that Siinpkins murdered Eliza Grim- 
wood, that Larkins cut Thistlewood's head off, and that Podgers was 
tried at the Old Bailey, in the year 'thirty- five, for an attempt to set 
the Thames on fire. But I was infinitely harassed while the clock was 
ticking periodically — the efforts I had to make to keep it from 
running down altogether ! — by the great plague of " Suggesters." 
From the metropolitan and suburban postal districts, from all parts of 
the United Kingdom — the United Kingdom, pshaw ! from the Continent 
generally, and from across the broad Atlantic (fortunately, the return 
mail from Australia was not yet due)— suggestions poured in as thickly 
as letters of congratulation on one who has just inherited a vast fortune- 
If there had been five hundred in lieu of four-and-twenty hours in 
" Twice Round the Clock," the Great Suggestions I received had stomach 
for them all. The Suggesters would take no denial : I was bound 
under terrific penalties to adopt, endorse, carry out, their hints,-— else 
would they play the dickens with me. I must have a sing-song meeting 
for nine p.m. ; the committee of a burial club at ten ; the dissecting- 
room of an hospital at eleven ; a postal receiving-house, a lawyer's 
office, a rag, bones, and bottle shop, the tollgate of Waterloo Bridge, 
and the interior of a Hammersmith 'bus, at some hour or other of the 
day or night. The Suggestions were oral as well as written. Strange 
men darted up on me from by-streets, caught at my button with 
trembling fingers, told me in husky tones of their vast metropolitan 
experience, and impressed on me the necessity of a graphic tableau of 
Joe Perks, the sporting barber's, at one o'clock in the morning. Low- 
browed merchants popped from shady shell-fish shops, and, pointing to 
huge lobsters, asked where they could send the crustaceous delicacies with 
their compliments, and how excellent a thing it would be to give a view 
of the aristocracy supping at Whelks's celebrated oyster and kippered 
salmon warehouse after the play. And, finally, a shy acquaintance of 
mine, with a face like an over-ripe Stilton cheese, and remotely connected 
with the Corporation of London — he may be, for aught I know, a ticket- 
porter in Doctors' Commons, or a hanger-on to the water bailiff — 
favoured me with an occult inuendo that a word-picture of the Court of 
Common Council will be the very thing for four p.m., fluttering before 
my dazzled eyes a phantom ticket for the Guildhall banquet. In vain 
I endeavoured to convince these respectable Suggesters, that the papers 
in question were not commenced without a definite plan of action ; that 
such plan, sketched forth years since, duly weighed, adjusted, and 



130 TWICE SOTJXD THE CLOCK. 

settled, after mature study and deliberation, not only so far as I am con- 
cerned, but by " parties " deeply learned in the mysteries of London 
Life, and versed in the recondite secret of pleasing the public taste, had 
at length been put into operation, and was no more capable of alteration 
than were the laws of the Medes and Persians. But all to no purpose 
did I make these representations. The Suggesters wouldn't be con- 
vinced ; their letters continued to flow in. They found out my address 
at last (they have lost it now, ha, ha !), and knocked my door down ; 
bringing me peremptory letters of introduction from people I didn't 
know, or didn't care five farthings about, or else introducing themselves 
boldly, in the li Bottle Imp " manner, with an implied " You must learn 
to love me ; " they nosed me in the lobby, and saw me dancing in the 
hall, and my only refuge at last was to go away. Yes ; the pulsations 
of time had to beat behind the dial of a clock in the rural districts ; and 
these lines were written among the hay and the ripening corn, laughing 
a bitter laugh to think that the postman was toiling up the quiet street 
in London with piles of additional suggestions, and that the Suggesters 
themselves were waiting for me in my usual haunts, in the fond expec- 
tation of a button to hold, or an ear to gloze suggestions within. 

I tried the sea-shore ; but found London -super-Hare sweltering, 
stewing, broiling, frying, fizzing, panting, in the sun — like Marseilles, 
minus the evil odours — to such an extent, and so utterly destitute of 
shade, that I was compelled to leave it. The paint was blistering on 
the bright green doors ; the shingly pavement seemed to cry out " Come 
and grill steaks on me ! " the pitch oozed from the seams of the fishing- 
boats ; the surf hissed as it came to kiss the pebbles on the beach ; the 
dial on the pierhead blazed with concentric rays \ the chains of the 
suspension bridge were red hot ; the camera obscura glared white in 
the sunshine ; the turf on the Steyne was brown and parched, like a 
forgotten oasis in a desert ; the leaves on the trees in the pavilion 
gardens glittered and chinked in the summer breeze, like new bright 
guineas \ the fly-horses hung their heads, their poor tongues protruding, 
their limbs flaccid, and their scanty tails almost powerless to flap away 
the swarms of flies, which alone were riotous and active of living crea- 
tion, inebriating themselves with saccharine suction in the grocers' 
shops, and noisily buzzing their scanmag in private parlours ; the flymen 
dozed on their boxes ; the pushers of invalid perambulators slumbered 
peacefully beneath the hoods of their own Bath chairs ; the ladies in 
the round hats found it too hot to promenade the cliff, and lolled instead 



ONE P.M, DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON. 131 

at verandahed windows, arrayed in the most ravishing of muslin morning 
wrappers, and conversed languidly with exquisites, whose moustaches 
were dank with moisture, and who had scarcely energy enough to yawn. 
The captivating amazons abandoned for the day their plumed hats, 
their coquettish gauntlets, their wash-leather sub-fusk garments with 
the straps and patent-leather boots, and deferred their cavalcades on the 
skittish mares till the cool of the evening ; the showy dragoon officers 
confined themselves, of their own free will, to the mess-room of their 
barracks on the Lewes road, where they sipped sangaree, smoked 
fragrancias, read "Bell's Life," and made bets on every imaginable 
topic. The hair of the little Skye terriers no longer curled, but hung 
supine in wiry hanks ; the little children made piteous appeals to their 
parents and guardians to be permitted to run about without anything 
on ; the two clerks at the branch bank, who are sleepy enough in the 
coldest weather, nodded at each other over the ledgers which had no 
entries in them. The only sound that disturbed the drowsy stillness of 
the streets was the popping of ginger-beer corks ; and the very fleas in 
the lodging-houses lost all their agility and vivacity. No longer did 
they playfully leap — no longer archly gyrate \ they crawled and crept, 
like their low relatives the bugs, and were caught and crushed without 
affording the slightest opportunity for sport. It was mortally hot at 
London-super-Mare, and I left it. Then 1 tried that English paradise 
of the west, Clifton ; but woe is me ! the Downs were so delightful ; the 
prospect so exquisitely lovely ; the Avon winding hundreds of feet 
beneath me, like a silver skein, yet bearing big three-masted ships on 
its bosom ; the rocks and underwood so full of matter for pleasant, lazy 
cogitation, that I felt the only exertion of which I was capable, to be 
writing sonnets on the Avon and its sedgy banks, or making lame 
attempts at pre-Rapkaelite sketches in water-colours ; or thinking 
about doing either, which amounts to pretty nearly the same thing. 
So I came away from Clifton too, and hung out my sign Hebe. (It is 
Theee now : swallows have come and gone, snows have gathered and 
melted, babies prattle now who were unborn and unthought of then.) 
Ye shall not know where Here was situated, oh, ye incorrigible Sug- 
gested. No more particular indices of its whereabouts will I give, 
even to the general public, than that close to my study was a dry 
skittle-ground, where every day — the hotter the better — I exercised 
myself with the wooden " cheese" against the seven and a-half pins 
which were all that the dry skittle-ground could furnish forth towards 



132 TWICE KOUND THE CLOCK. 

the ordinary nine ; that over-against this gymnastic course was an 
etable, a "shippon," as they call it in the north, where seven cows 
gravely ruminated ; and that, at the end of a yard crowded with 
agricultural implements which old Pyne alone could draw, there was a 
Stye, from which, looking over its palings, 

"All start, like boys who, unaware, 
Banging the woods to find a hare, 
Come to the mouth of some dark lair : 
Where, growling low, a fierce old bear 
Lies amid bones and blood/ ' 

Not that any fierce or ancient member of the ursine tribe resided 
therein ; but that it was the residence of a horrific-looking old sow, a 
dreadful creature, that farrowed unheard-of families of pigs, that lay 
on her broadside starboard the live-long day, winking her cruel eye, 
and grunting with a persistent sullenness. The chief swineherd proudly 
declared her to be " the viciousest beast as ever was," and hinted darkly 
that she had killed a Man. The chief swineherd and I were friends. 
He was my "putter-up" at skittles, and did me the honour to report 
among the neighbouring peasantry, that "barrin' the gent as cum here 
last autumn, and was off his head" (insane, I presume); I was "the 
very wust hand at knock-'em -downs he ever see." It is something to 
be popular in the rural districts ; and yet I was not three miles distant 
from the Regent Circus. 

My eyes are once again turned to the clock face. It is One o' Clock 
in the Afternoon, and I must think of London. Come back, ye memo- 
ries : open Sesame, ye secret chambers of the brain, and let me tran- 
sport myself away from the dry skittle-ground, the seven grave cows 
and the vicious sow, to plunge once more into the toil and trouble of 
the seething, eddying Mistress City of the world. 

There are so many things going on at one o'clock in the day ; the 
steam of life is by that time so thoroughly " up," that I am embarrassed 
somewhat to know which scenes would be the best to select from the 
plethora of tableaux I find among my stereoscopic slides. One o'clock 
is the great time for making business appointments. You meet your 
lawyer at one ; you walk down to the office of the newspaper you may 
happen to write for, and settle the subject of your leading article, at 
one. One o'clock is a capital hour to step round to your stockbroker, 



ONE P.M. DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON. 133 

in Pope's Head Alley, Cornhill, and do a little business in stocks or 
shares. At one o'clock the Prime Minister, or his colleagues, have 
resignation enough to listen (with tolerable patience) to some half 
dozen deputations who come to harangue them about nothing in par- 
ticular; at one o'clock obliging noblemen take the chair at public 
meetings at the Freemasons', or the London Tavern. At one o'clock — 
from one to two rather — the aristocracy indulge in the sumptuous 
meal known as " lunch." At one o'clock that vast, yet to thousands 
unknown and unrecked of city, which I may call Dock London, is in 
full activity after some twenty minutes' suspension while the workmen 
take their lunch. 

The ingenious and persevering artist w r ho constructed that grand 
model of Liverpool, which we all remember in the Exhibition of 1851, 
and which is now in the Derby Museum of the city of the Liver, did 
very wisely in making the Docks the most prominent feature in his 
model, and treating the thoroughfares of the town merely as secondary 
adjuncts. For the Docks are in reality Liverpool, even as the poet has 
said that love is of man's life a part, but woman's whole existence. 
Our interest in the Queen of the Mersey commences at Birkenhead, and 
ends at Bramiey Moore Dock, on the other side. I say Bramley Moore 
Dock, because that was the last constructed when I was in Liverpool. 
Some dozens more may have been built since I was there. Docks are 
like jealousy, and grow continually by what they feed on. We can ill 
afford to surrender so noble a public building as St. George's Hall, so 
thronged and interesting a thoroughfare as Dale Street j yet it must 
be confessed that the attention of the visitor to Liverpool is concen- 
trated and absorbed by the unrivalled and magnificent docks. So he 
who visits Venice, ardent lover of art and architecture as he may 
be, gives on his first sojourn but a cursory glance at the churches and 
palaces ; he is fascinated and engrossed by the canals and the gondolas. 
So the stranger in Petersburg and Moscow has at first but scant atten- 
tion to bestow on the superb monuments, the picturesque costumes ; his 
senses are riveted upon the golden domes of Tzaaks and the Kremlin. 
Liverpool is one huge dock ; and from the landing-stage to West 
Derby island, everything is of the docks and docky. The only wonder 
seems to be that the ships do not sail up the streets, and discharge 
their cargoes at the doors of the merchants' counting-houses. But in 
London, in the suburbs, in the West-end, in the heart of the city oft- 
times, what do we know or care about the docks ? There are scores 



134 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

of members of the Stock Exchange, I will be bound, who never entered 
the dock gates, and those few who have paid a visit to Dock London, 
may merely have gone there with a tasting-order for wine. When we 
consider that in certain aristocratic circles it is reckoned to be rather a 
breach of etiquette than otherwise to know anything about the manners 
and customs of the dwellers on the other side of Temple Bar, even as 
the by-gone snob-cynic of fashion and literature professed entire igno- 
rance as to the locality of Russell Square, and wanted to know " where 
you changed horses" in a journey to Bloomsbury — unless, indeed, my 
Lord Duke or my Lady Marchioness happen to be a partner in a great 
brewing and banking firm, under which circumstances he or she may 
roll down in her chariot to the city to glance over the quarterly balance 
sheet of profit ; when w r e consider that this world of a town has cities 
upon cities within its bosom, that in the course of a long life may never 
be visited ; when we think of Bermondsey, Bethnal Green, Somers 
Town, Olerkenwell, Hoxton, Hackney, Stepney, Bow, Rotherhithe, 
Horsleydown — places of which the great and titled may read every 
day in a newspaper, and ask, languidly, where they are, — we need 
no longer be surprised if the Docks are ignored by thousands, and 
if old men die every day who have never beheld their marvels. 

Coming home from abroad often, with an intelligent foreigner, I 
persuade him to renounce the Calais route and the South-Eastern 
Railway, and even to abjure the expeditious run from Newhaven. I 
decoy him on board one of the General Steam Navigation vessels at 
Boulogne, and when his agonies of sea-sickness have, in the course of 
half a dozen hours or so, subsided — when we have passed Margate, 
Gravesend, Erith, Woolwich, Greenwich even — when I have got him 
past the Isle of Dogs, and we are bearing swiftly on our way towards 
the Pool — I clap my intelligent foreigner on the back, and cry, " Now 
look around (Eugene or Alphonse, as the case may be) ; now look around, 
and see the glory of England. Not in huge armies, bristling with 
bayonets, and followed by monstrous guns ; not in granite forts, 
grinning from the waters like ghoules from graves ; not in lines of 
circumvallation, miles and miles in extent ; not in earthworks, counter- 
scarps, bastions, ravelins, mamelons, casemates, and gunpowder maga- 
zines — shall be found our pride and our strength. Behold them, 
intelligent person of foreign extraction ! in yonder forest of masts, in 
the flags of every nation that fly from those tapering spars on the 
ships, in the great argosies of commerce that from every port in the 



ONE P.M. — DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON. 135 

world have congregated to do honour to the monarch of marts, London, 
and pour out the riches of the universe at her proud feet." After this 
flourishing exordium — the sense of which you may have heard on a 
former occasion, for it forms part of my peroration on the grandeur of 
England, and, if my friends and acquaintances are to be believed, I 
bore them terribly with it sometimes — I enter into some rapid details 
concerning the tonnage and import dues of the port of London ; and 
then permit the intelligent foreigner to dive down below again to his 
berth. Sometimes the foreign fellow turns out to be a cynic, and 
declares that he cannot see the forest of masts for the fog, if it be 
winter — for the smoke, if it be summer. 

But the docks of London — by which, let me be perfectly under- 
stood, (I do not, by any means, intend to confine myself to the 
London Docks) I speak of Dock London in its entirety : of the 
London and St. Katherine's, of the East and West India, and the 
Victoria Docks — what huge reservoirs are they of wealth, and energy, 
and industry ! See those bonding warehouses, apoplectic with the 
produce of three worlds, congested with bales of tobacco and barrels 
of spices ; with serons of cochineal, and dusky, vapid-smelling chests 
of opium from Turkey or India ; with casks of palm-oil, and packages 
of vile chemicals, ill-smelling oxides and alkalis, dug from the bowels 
of mountains thousands of miles away, and which, ere long, will be 
transformed into glowing pigments and exquisite perfumes ; with shape- 
less masses of india rubber, looking inconceivable dirty and nasty, yet 
from which shall come delicate little cubes with which ladies shall 
eraze faulty pencil marks from their landscape copies after Kout and 
Harding — india rubber that shall be spread over our coats and moulded 
into shoes, yea, and drawn out in elastic ductility, to form little 
filaments in pink silk ligatures— I dare not mention their English 
appellation, but in Italian they are called " legaccie " — which shall 
encircle the bases of the femurs of the fairest creatures in creation; 
with bags of rice and pepper, with ingots of chocolate and nuggets 
and nibs of cocoa, and sacks of roasted chicory. The great hide 
warehouses, where are packed the skins of South American cattle, of 
which the horns, being left on the hides, distil anything but pleasant 
odours, and which lie, prone to each other, thirsting for the tan-pit. 
See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with 
sugar in casks, and bags, and boxes.* How many million cups of tea 

* Free-grown sugar in the first two : slave-grown sugar in "boxes. 



136 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

will be sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined ! how 
many tomesful of gossiping scandal will be talked to the relish of 
those saccharine dainties ! what stores of barley-sugar temples and 
Chantilly baskets for the rich, of brandyballs and hardbake for the 
poor, will come from those coarse canvas bags, those stained and sticky 
casks ! And the huge tea warehouses, where the other element of 
scandal, the flowery Pekoe or the family Souchong, slumbers in 
tinfoiled chests. And the coffee warehouses, redolent of bags of Mocha 
and Mountain, Texan and Barbadian berries. And the multitudinous, 
almost uncataloguable, mass of other produce : shellac, sulphur, gum- 
benzoin, ardebs of beans and pulse from Egypt, yokes of copper from 
Asia Minor ; sponge, gum-arabic, silk and muslin from Smyrna ; flour 
from the United States ; hides, hams, hemp, rags, and especially 
tallow in teeming casks, from Russia and the Baltic provinces ; 
mountains of timber from Canada and Sweden; fruit, Florence oil, 
tinder, raw cotton (though the vast majority of that staple goes to 
Liverpool), indigo, saffron, magnesia, leeches, basket-work, and wash- 
leather ! The ships vomit these on the dock quays, and the ware- 
houses swallow them up again like ogres. But there is in one dock, 
the London, an underground store, that is the Aaron's rod of dock 
warehouses, and devours all the rest. For there, in a vast succession 
of vaults, roofed with cobwebs many years old, are stored in pipes and 
hogsheads the wines that thirsty London — thirsty England, Ireland, 
and Scotland — must needs drink. What throats they have, these 
consumers ! what oceans of good liquor their Garagantuan appetites 
demand ! Strange stories have been told about these docks, and the 
thirsty souls who visit them with tasting-orders ; how the brawny 
coopers stride about with candles in cleft sticks, and, piercing casks 
with gimlets, pour out the rich contents, upon the sawdust that covers 
the floor, like water ; how cases of champagne are treated as of as little 
account as though they were cases of small beer ; how plates of cheese- 
crumbs are handed round to amateurs that they may chasten their 
palates and keep them in good tone of taste ; how the coopers are well 
nigh infallible in detecting who are the tasters that visit these (i wine 
vaults" with a genuine intention of buying, and who the epicureans, 
whose only object in visiting the London Docks is to drink, gratuitously 
on the premises, as much good wine as they can conveniently carry. 
Strange, very strange stories, too, are told of the occasional inconve- 
nience into which the " convenient carriage " degenerates ; of respect- 



ONE P.M. — DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON. 



137 




138 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

able fathers of families appearing in the open street, after they have 
run the tether of the tasting-order, staggering and dishevelled, and 
with bloodshot eyes, their cravats twisted round to the backs of their 
necks like bagwigs, and incoherently declaring that cheese always 
disagreed with them. I am candidly of opinion, however, that the 
majority of these legends are apocryphal, or, in the rare cases when 
they have a foundation in fact, belong to the history of the past, and 
that commercial sobriety, in the highest order, is the rule in the wine 
vaults of the London Docks. 

But the Ships ! Who shall describe those white-sailed camels ? who 
shall tell in graphic words of the fantastic interlacing of their masts 
and rigging, of the pitchy burliness of their bulging sides ; of the 
hives of human ants who in barges and lighters surround them, or 
swarm about their cargo-cumbered decks ? Strange sight to see, these 
mariners from every quarter of the globe ; of every variety of stature 
and complexion, from the swarthy Malay to the almost albino Finn ; 
in every various phase of picturesque costume, from the Suliote of the 
fruitship, in his camise and capote, to the Yankee foremast-man in his 
red shirt, tarry trousers, and case-knife hung by a strand of lanyards 
to his girdle. But not alone of the maritime genus are the crowds 
who throng the docks. There are lightermen, stovedores, bargees, and 
" lumpers ;" there are passengers flocking to their narrow berths on 
board emigrant ships ; there are entering and wharfingers' clerks travel- 
ing about in ambulatory counting-houses mounted on wheels ; there are 
land rats and water rats, ay, and some that may be called pirates of 
the long-shore, and over whom it behoves the dock policemen and the 
dock watchmen to exercise a somewhat rigid supervision — for they will 
pick and steal, these piratical ne'er-do-weels, any trifle, unconsidered 
or not, that comes handy to their knavish digits ; and as they emerge 
from the dock-gates, it is considered by no means a breach of etiquette 
for an official to satisfy himself, by a personal inspection of their 
garments, that they don't happen to have concealed about them, of 
course by accident, such waifs and strays as a bottle of Jamaica rum, 
a lump of gutta percha, a roll of sheet copper, or a bundle of 
Havannah cigars. 

But a clanging bell proclaims the hour of one, and the dock- 
labourers, from Tower Hill to the far-off Isle of Dogs, are summoned 
back to their toil. Goodness and their own deplenished pockets only 
know how they have been lunching, or on what coarse viands they have 



ONE P.M. — DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON. 139 

fed since noon. Many have not fed at all ; for, of the motley herd of 
dock -labourers, hundreds, especially in the London Docks — where no 
recommendation save strength is needed, and they are taken on their 
good behaviour from day to day — are of the Irish way of thinking ; and, 
wonderfully economical, provident, self-denying are those much maligned 
Hibernians when they are earning money. They are only spendthrifts 
and indolent when they have nothing. They will content themselves 
with a fragment of hard, dry bread, and the bibulous solace of the 
nearest pump, and go home cheerfully at dusk to the unsavoury den — be 
it in Whitechapel or in Bloomsbury or in far-off Kensington, for they 
prefer strangely to live at the farthest possible distance from their place 
of daily toil — where their ragged little robins of children dwell like so 
many little pigs under a bed. And there they will partake of a mess of 
potatoes, with one solitary red herring smashed up therein, to " give it a 
relish." They will half starve themselves, and go as naked as the 
police will permit them to go ; but they will be very liberal to the 
priest, and will scrape money together to bring their aged and infirm 
parents over from the il ould country." That is folly and superstition, 
people will say. Of course, what people say must be right. 

Some dock-labourers lunch on too much beer and too little bread ; 
for they are held in thraldom by certain unrighteous publicans, who 
still pursue, with great contentment and delectation to themselves, but 
to the defrauding, ruin, and misery of their customers, the atrocious 
trade, now well nigh rooted from the manufacturing and mining 
districts, known as the " tommy-shop " system. I think I need 
scarcely explain what this system is, for, under its twin denomination 
of l - truck," it has already formed a subject for Parliamentary inquiry. 
Let it suffice to say, that the chief feature in the amiable system consists 
in giving the labourer a fallacious and delusive credit to the amount of 
his weekly wages, and supplying him with victuals and drink (chiefly 
the latter) at an enormous rate of profit. The labourer is paid by his 
foreman in tickets instead of cash, and invariably finds himself at the 
end of the week victimised, or, to use a more expressive, though not so 
genteel a term, diddled, to a heart-rending extent. Dock-labourers who 
are in regular gangs and regularly employed, are the greatest sufferers 
by this unjust mode of payment. As to the casual toilers who crowd 
about the gates at early morning in the hope of being engaged for 
a working day, they are paid half a crown, and are free to squander or 
to hoard the thirty pence as they list. That industrious and peaceable 



HO TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

body of men, the coalwhippers, groaned for a long period under the ini- 
quities of the truck system ; they are now protected by a special Act 
of Parliament, renewed from time to time ; but the dock-labourers yet 
eat their bread leavened by a sense of injustice. There are none to help 
them ; for they have no organisation, and very few friends. It is per- 
fectly true that the dock-companies have nothing whatsoever to do with 
the social servitude under which their labourers groan ; and that it is 
private speculators who work the system for their own aggrandisement ; 
but the result to the labourer is the same. I don't think it matters to 
Quashie, the negro slave, when he is beaten, whether the cowhide be 
wielded by Mr. Simon Legree, the planter, or by Quimbo, the black 
driver. 

Look at these labourers, and wonder. For it is matter for astonish- 
ment to know that among these meanly-clad, frequently ragged men, 
coarse, dirty, and repulsive in aspect, there are very many who have 
been tenderly bred and nurtured ; who have been, save the mark, 
gentlemen ! who have received University educations and borne the 
Queen's commission. And here also are the draff and husks of foreign 
immigration ; Polish, German, and Italian exiles. They have come to 
this — down to this— up to this, if you choose ; come to the old, old level, 
as old as Gardener Adam's time, of earning the daily bread by the sweat 
of the brow. It were better so than to starve ; better so than to steal. 

What time the dock-labourers have finished lunch, another very 
meritorious class of human ants begin their prandial repasts. With 
just one thought at the vast number of merchants', brokers', shipping- 
agents', warehousemen's, wholesale dealers' counting-houses that exist 
in London city, you will be able to form an idea of the legions of clerks, 
juniors and seniors, who, invariably early-breakfasting men, must get 
seriously hungry at one p.m. Some I know are too proud to dine at 
this patriarchal hour. They dine, after office hours, at Simpson's, at the 
Albion, at the London, or, save us, at the Wellington. They go even 
further west, and patronise Feetum's, or the Scotch Stores in Regent 
Street, merely skating out, as it w r ere, for a few minutes at noon, for a 
snack at that Bay Tree to which I have already alluded. Many, and 
they are the married clerks, bring neat parcels with them, containing 
sandwiches or bread-and-cheese, consuming those refreshments in the 
counting-house. In the very great houses, it is not considered etiquette 
to dine during office-hours, save on foreign-post nights. As to the 
extremely junior clerks, or office-boys, as they are irreverently termed, 



ONE P.M. — DOCK LONDOX AND DINING LONDON. 



1-1 J 




142 TWICE SOUND TEE CLOCK. 

they eat whatever they can get, and whenever they can get it, very fre- 
quently getting nothing at all. But there are yet hundreds upon 
hundreds of clerks who consume an orthodox dinner of meat, vegetables, 
and cheese — and on high days and holidays pudding — at one p.m. 
Their numbers are sufficient to cram almost to suffocation the eating- 
houses of Cheapside, the Poultry, Mark Lane, Cornhill, and especially 
Bucklersbury. Of late years there has been an attempt to change the 
eating-houses of Cheapside into pseudo " restaurants." Seductive 
announcements^ brilliantly emblazoned, and showily framed and glazed, 
have been hung up, relating to " turtle" and " venison ; " salmon, with 
wide waddling months, have gasped in the windows ; and insinuating 
mural inscriptions have hinted at the existence of " Private dining- 
rooms for ladies." Now, whatever can ladies— though I have the 
authority of Mr. Charles Dibdin and my own lips for declaring that 
there are fine ones in the city — want to come and dine in Cheapside for? 
At these restaurants they give you things with French names, charge 
you a stated sum for attendance,, provide the pale ale in silver tankards, 
and take care of your hat and coat ; but I like them not — neither, I 
believe, do my friends, the one-o'clock-dining clerks. Either let me go 
to Birch's or the Anti-Gallican, or let me take my modest cut of roast 
and boiled, my " one o' taters," my u cheese and sallary," at an eating- 
house in Bucklersbury — such a one as my alter ego, Mr. M 'Conn ell, has 
here presented for your edification. And his pictured morals must eke 
out my written apophthegms — for this sheet is full. 



TWO P.M.— FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 

I bueathe again. I see before me, broad-spread, a vista of gentility. 
I have done, for many hours to come, with shabby subjects. No more 
dams I'll make for fish — in Billingsgate ; nor scrape trencher, nor wash 
dish, at second-rate eating-houses ; nor fetch firing at requiring in 
Oovent Garden or the Docks. Prospero must get a new man, for 
Caliban has got a new master : Fashion, in Regent Street. 

I declare that when I approach this solemnly-genteel theme, my 



TWO P.M. — PROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 143 

frame dilates, my eyes kindle, my heart dances. I experience an 
intense desire to array myself in purple and fine linen, knee shorts, 
lace ruffles, pink silk stockings, diamond buckles, and a silver-hilted 
sword; to have my hair powdered, and my jewelled tabatiere filled 
with scented rappee ; to sit with my feet on a Turkey carpet, before a 
table inlaid with marqueterie, wax candles in silver sconces (the candles 
all green, with fillagree bobeches) on either side ; and then — while my 
Dulcinea in a hoop petticoat, a point lace apron, red-heeled males, a 
toupet and a mouche on the left cheek, her feathered fan, painted by 
Fragonard on the finest chicken-skin, lying beside her — plays the 
minuet from " Ariadne " in an adjoining and gilded salon, decorated 
in the Style Pompadour, on the harpsichord ; and on pink scented 
note-paper, with a diamond pointed pen and violet ink — the golden 
pounce-box at my elbow — then under these circumstances and with 
these luxurious appliances around me, I think I could manage to devote 
myself to the task of inditing matter concerning Regent Street in the 
smoothest dythrambics. This is rather a violent contrast to the dry 
skittle-ground, the cows, and the depraved sow which inspired me in 
the last chapter ; but only take my subject into consideration : only 
permit me to inoculate you with one drop of the ethereal nectar which 
should be quaffed by every writer who would look upon Eegent Street 
from a proper point of view. Ladies and gentlemen moving in the 
polite circles have — but that is long ago — accused me of being of 
Bohemia, and to that manner born ; of writing a great deal too much 
about the Virginian weed in its manufactured state, and the fermented 
infusion of malt and hops ; publishers have refused to purchase my 
novels because they contained too many descriptions of "low life;" 
because my heroes and heroines were too frequently ragged and forlorn 
creatures, who did'nt go into " society/' who did'nt go to church, who 
were never seen at the May meetings in Exeter Hall, but who went to 
public-houses and penny-gaffs instead. Oh, lords and ladies! oh, 
brilliant butterflies of society ! oh, respectable people of every degree ! 
whose ear coarse language wounds, but who would have, believe me, to 
undergo much coarser deeds from the ragged ones you despise, were it 
not for the humble efforts of us poor pen-and-ink missionaries ; salt 
ones of the earth ! think that you are but hundreds among the millions 
of the tattered and torn, who have never studied the " Handbook to 
Etiquette/' nor heard of Burke and Debrett, and who would eat peas 
with their knives if they had any peas to eat — Heaven help them ! 



144 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

They are around and about you always. I have no greed of gain in 
advocating their cause, for I am unknown to them, and am of your 
middle class, and am as liable to be stoned by the ragged ones for 
having a better coat than they any day. But woe be to you, 
respectables, if you shut you ears to their plaints and your eyes to their 
condition. For the stones may fly thick and fast some day ; there 
may be none to help you, and it may be too late to cry for help. 

I have heard Regent Street compared to the Boulevard des Italiens, 
to Unter-den-Linden et Berlin, to Broadway at New York, to the 
Montagne de la Cour at Brussels, to the Corso de' Servi at Milan, to 
the Toledo at Naples, to George Street, Sydney, and to the Nevskoi 
Perspective at Petersburg. In my opinion, Regent Street is an amal- 
gamation of all these streets, and surpasses them all. Their elements 
are strained, filtered, refined, condensed, sublimated, to make up one 
glorious thoroughfare. Add to this, the unique and almost indescribable 
cachet which the presence of English aristocracy lends to every place it 
chooses for its frequentation, and the result is Regent Street. Of the 
many cities I have w r andered into and about, there is but one possessing 
a street that can challenge comparison with — and that, I must confess, 
w r ell nigh equals — the street that Nash, prince of architects, built for 
the fourth George. At a right angle from the pleasant waters of the 
river LifFey, there runs a street, wide in dimensions, magnificent in the 
proportions of its edifices, splendid in its temples and its palaces, though 
many of the latter, alas ! are converted now 7 into hotels, now into linen- 
drapers' shops ; but on a golden summer's afternoon, w r hen you see, 
speeding towards the column of Nelson in the distance, the glittering 
equipages of the rich and noble, who yet have their dwelling in Eblana ; 
the clattering orderlies, on sleek-groomed horses, and with burnished 
accoutrements, spurring from the Castle towards the Post Office — and, 
beauty of beauties, the side w r alks on either hand converted into parterres 
of living flowers, the grand and glorious Irish girls, with their bright 
raimant and brighter eyes ; you will acknowledge that Regent Street 
has a rival, that beyond St. George's Channel is a street that the 
triumphal procession of a Zenobia or a Semiramis might pass down, 
and that the queen of streets is Sackville Street, Dublin. 

Do you know, youth of the present generation — for I fondly hope 
that I have good store of juveniles among my readers — that Regent- 
Street has its antiquities, its archaeologia, its topographical curiosities ? 
Mr. Peter Cunningham knows them all by heart ; I am not about to 



TWO P.M. — FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 145 

steal from the "Handbook of London'' of our modern Camden; but 
will just tell you, in my desultory way, that, in the days when the 
3Iews reared their head, an unsightly mass of brick buildings, in the 
area which is now Trafalgar Square ; when Carlton House loomed 
at the eastern end of Pall Mall, instead of the ugly post erected as a 
monument of national gratitude to the Royal Duke who paid nobody ; 
when the Golden Cross, Charing Cross, was hemmed in by a cobweb 
mass of dirty tenements, and Hungerford Market was yet a mass of 
fishy hovels ungraced by Hungerford Hall and Mr. Gatti's penny-ice 
shop ; when the old " Courier" newspaper office stood (over-against Mr. 
Cross's older Exeter 'Change, with the elephant's tusks displayed out- 
side, the shops beneath, and Chunee and the wild beasts all alive and 
roaring upstairs) in the space that now forms the approach to "Waterloo 
Bridge ; and when the vicinity of Temple Bar was blocked up by a 
brick-and-mortar cloaca, since swept away to form what is now termed 
Picket Place. Are you at all aware, neophytes in topographical lore, 
that the area of Regent Street the superb, was occupied by mean and 
shambling tenth-rate avenues, anions which the chiefest was a large, 
dirty highway, called Great Swallow Street 1 Old Fuller (I don't 
know why he should be called "old" so persistently, for he did not 
attain anything like a venerable age) was in the habit of collecting 
information for the ""Worthies of England" from the tottering crones 
who sat spinning by the ingle-nook, and from the white-headed grand- 
sires sunning themselves on the bench by the almshouse door. In like 
manner, I owe much of the information I possess on the aspect of Lon- 
don streets, at the time just previous to my nonage, to communing with 
nurses and nurses' female friends. The good folks who tend children, 
seldom deem that the little pitchers they say jestingly have long ears, 
will suck their lore in so greedily, or retain it so long. 

My personal acquaintance with Regent Street dates from the year 
'thirty-two, when I remember a great scrambling procession of opera- 
tives, with parti-coloured flags, emblazoned with devices I could not 
read, passing down it. Mrs. Esner, who was then attached to my 
person in a domestic capacity (she often calls upon me now, and. 
saying that she "missed" me, expatiates on the benefits of a pound of 
green tea), told me that these operatives belonged to the " Trades 
Union." She said — though the good woman must have exaggerated — 
that they were half a million in number, and I recollect her portend- 
ing, in a grave low voice, that there would be riots that night. I 



146 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

don't think that any occurred ; but long after, whenever I saw a crowd, 
I used to ask whether " there would be any riots" that night, just as I 
might have inquired whether there would be any bread-and-butter for 
tea. This was about the time that they used to call the great Duke 
of Wellington "Nosey," and " Sawbones," and to break his windows. 
I was too young to know then, that the Athenians grew tired of hear- 
ing Aristides called " The Just;" and that a nation once grumbled at 
having to pay for the palace it had bestowed upon that John Churchill, 
Duke of Marlborough, who won the battle of Blenheim. I think, too, 
there must have been something about the Cholera in my earliest recol- 
lections of Regent Street ; yet, no : I lived in North Audley Street at 
that time, and opposite the mansion of the great Earl of Clarendon ; 
for, as clearly as though it were yesterday, I see now in the eye to 
which the attention of Horatio, friend of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, 
was directed— a hot autumn afternoon. I am at the nursery-window 
in sad disgrace, and pouting because I have wrenched the sprightly 
wooden hussar from the horse which had the semi-circle of wire with 
the bullet at the end fixed in his stomach, and who used, with that 
impetus, to swing so deftly. There is much commotion in the great 
earl's mansion ; for one of the servants partook too plentifully last 
night of gooseberry-fool after a rout his lordship gave — where are the 
" routs" and the " gooseberry- fools" now? — and she is dead this morn- 
ing of cholera morbus. My female entourage are unanimously exacting 
in calling it cholera " morbus." The undertaker's men bring the body 
out ; the shell gleams white in the afternoon's sunshine, and it is begirt 
with cords; "for," says the domestic oracles behind me, "it was so 
mortal swole that it would 'ave bust else." A horrible rumour runs 
about, that the coffin has been " pitched and sealed." What can 
" pitching and sealing" mean % There is a great crowd before the 
earl's door, who are violent and clamorous, because rumour — a servant's 
hall, an area gate, a coachman from-the-house-to-his-wife-in-the-mews 
rumour — bruits it about that the body has not been washed. My 
nurse says that they will have to send for the "padroll" with "cut- 
lashes." All these things sink into my little mind ; and then the 
whole sequel, with a train of years behind it, fade away, leaving me 
with but one more recollection — that we had a twopenny cottage-loaf 
boiled in milk that day for dinner, which was consequently swollen to 
twice its natural size ; and which the Eumenides of the nursery autho- 
ritatively assured me was, with brown sugar, the " best puddin' out." 
I know now that congested loaf to have been an insipid swindle. 



TWO P.M. FHO:\I KEGEXT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 147 

I am again in Regent Street, but at another window, and in another 
house. There is no nurse now, but a genteel young woman, aged about 
thirty — she asked me once, for fun, how old she was, and I guessed, in 
all youthful seriousness, fifty, whereupon she slapped me — to take care 
of me. Her name is Sprackmore, she has long corkscrew ringlets, and 
is very pious, and beneath her auspices I first study the " Loss of the 
Kent East Indiaman," and the " Dairyman's Daughter." She has fits, 
too, occasionally. I am just of that age to be a hollow-eyed little boy 
in a tunic, with a frill and a belt, and to be dreadfully afraid of the 
pareut I used a year before to love and caress with such fearless confi- 
dence. They say I am a clever child, and my cleverness is encouraged 
by being told that I am not to ask questions, and that I had much 
better go and play with my toys than mope over that big volume of 
Lyttelton's " History of England/' lent to me by Mr. Somebody, the 
lawyer — I see him now, very stout and gray, at the funeral whenever 
any of us dies : of which volume— it is in very shabby condition — I 
break the top-cover off by letting it fall from the chair, which is my 
reading-desk. I suffer agonies of terror and remorse for months, lest 
the fracture should be discovered, though I have temporarily repaired 
it by means of a gimlet and a piece of twine. Then, one bright day, 
my cousin Sarah gives me a bright five-shilling piece — I take her to 
the opera now, but she always remembers my childish dependence upon 
her, and insists upon paying the cab home — and take Lyttelton's " His- 
tory," still with great fear and trembling, to a bookbinder's in Broad 
Street, Golden Square, who tells me that the "hends is jagged," and 
that there must be a new back, lettering, and gilding to the book. He 
works his will with it, and charges me four shillings and sixpence out 
of the live shilling-piece for working it ; but to tell of the joyful relief 
I feel when I bring Lyttelton's "History" back safe and sound ! I do 
not get rid of m} r perturbation entirely, however, till I have rubbed the 
back against the carpet a little to soil it, in order that it may not 
look too new. Oh ! the agonies, the Laocoon-like conscience windings, 
the Promethean tortures, that children suffer through these accidental 
breakages ! Oh ! the unreasoning cruelty of parents, who punish chil- 
dren for such mischances ! So I am the little boy in a tunic ) and I 
daresay that, with my inquisitiveness, and my moping over books, I 
am an intolerable little nuisance. I am at the Regent Street window, 
and much speculation is rife as to whether the King, who is lying 
mortally sick at Windsor, is dead. For it is within a few minutes of 



148 



TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 




TWO P.M. EHOX REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 149 

eleven, and at that time the well-known troop of Horse Guards jpass on 
their way to St. James's ; and it is reasonably inferred that, if King 
William be gathered to his fathers, the standard will be furled. The 
Guards pass ; they wore helmets, with plumes above them shaped like 
black mutton chops — not the casques with the flowing horse-hair they 
wear now ; and to be sure the standard is furled, in a species of drab 
umbrella case. The King is dead for sure ; nay, he does not die for a 
full week afterwards ; the flag was merely furled because the day was 
dark and lowering, presaging rain. 

I told you hours since that I lived in the house in Regent Street in 
which the llarquis de Bourbel forged his letters of credit.* I think 
that I am qualified to speak of the place, for, walking down it the 
other day, I counted no less than eleven houses, between the two 
circuses, in which I had at one time dwelt. But they were all early, 
those remembrances, and connected with the time when the colonnade 
of the Quadrant existed — "La mile de Londres^ as the foreign en- 
gravers of pictorial note-paper used grandiloquently to call it. What- 
ever could have possessed our Commissioner of Woods and Forests to 
allow those unrivalled arcades to be demolished ! The stupid trades- 
men, whose purblind, shop-till avarice led them to petition for the 
removal of the columns, gained nothing by the change, for the Quadrant, 
as a lounge in wet w T eather, was at once destroyed ; and I see now 
many of the houses, once let out in superior apartments, occupied as 
billiard-rooms and photographic studios, and many of the shops invaded 
and conquered by cheap tailors. The Quadrant colonnade afforded 
not only a convenient shelter beneath, but it was a capital prome- 
nade for the dwellers in the first-floors above. The entresols certainly 
were slightly gloomy ; and moustached foreigners, together with some 
gaily-dressed company still naughtier, could with difficulty be restrained 
from prowling backwards and forwards between Glasshouse Street and 
the County Fire Office. But, perambulating Regent Street at all hours 
of the day and night, as I do now frequently, I see no diminution in 
the number of moustached, or rouged, or naughty faces, whose proto- 
types were familiar to me, years agone, in the brilliant Quadrant. As 
to the purlieus of the County Fire Office, they are confusion, and a 
scandal to London and its police. The first-floor balconies above were 
in my childhood most glorious playgrounds. There I kept preserves 

* See page 30. 



150 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

of broken bottles and flowerpots ; on those leads I inscribed fantastic 
devices in chalk and with penknives, drawing silver diagrams through 
the cake of dust and dried refrain that covered the metal ; and often 
have I come to domestic grief through an irresistible propensity for 
poaching on the balconies of the neighbours on either side. Still in 
a state of tunic-hood, I remember a very tall, handsome gentleman, 
with a crimson velvet under-waistcoat — I saw his grave in Pere la 
Chaise last winter — who w r as my great aider and abettor in these juve- 
nile escapades. He had a wondrous weapon of offence called a " sabar- 
cane," a delightful thing (to me then), half walking-stick, half pea- 
shooter, from which he used to discharge clay pellets at the vagrant 
cats on the adjoining balconies. He it was who was wont to lean over 
the balcony, and fish for people's hats with a salmon-hook affixed to 
the extremity of a tandem-whip ; he it was who came home from the 
Derby (quite in a friendly manner) to see us one evening, all white — 
white hat, white coat, w r hite trousers, w r hite waistcoat, white necker- 
chief, white boots, to say nothing of the dust and the flour with which 
he had been plentifully besprinkled at Kennington Gate. He had 
won heavily on some horse long since gone to grass for ever, was very 
merry, and insisted upon winding-up our new French clock with the 
snuffers. He it was who made nocturnal excursions from parapet to 
parapet along the leads, returning with bewildering accounts of bearded 
men who were gambling with dice at No. 92 ; of the tenor of the 
Italian Opera, who, knife in hand, was pursuing his wife (in her night- 
dress) about the balcony, at No. 74 ; and of Mademoiselle Follejambes, 
the premier snjet of the same establishment, who was practising pirouttes 
before a cheval glass at the open window of No. 86, while Mademoiselle 
Follejambe's mamma, with a red cotton pocket-handkerchief tied round 
her old head, was drinking anisette out of a tea-cup, You must be 
forbearing with me, if, while I speak of Regent Street, I interlard my 
speech with foreign languages a little. For, from its first erection, the 
Quadrant end of Regent Street has been the home of the artistic 
foreigners who are attracted to London during the musical and operatic 
season, less by inclination for the climate and respect for the institu- 
tions of England, than by a profound admiration for the circular 
effigies, in gold, (with neatly milled edges) of her Majesty the Queen, 
which John Bull so liberally bestows on those who squall or fiddle for 
him, provided they be of foreign extraction. Let me not be too unjust, 
however, to Bull. Find him but a real English tenor, and J. B. will 



TWO P.M FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 151 

smother him in bank-notes, and deafen him with plaudits. From the 
balconies of Regent Regent, I have seen the greatest cantatrici and 
bailer ine of this age. The Grand Cham of tenors, who has never been 
replaced — no signor Mario, no Signor Giuglini, no Signor Mongini^ no 
Signor Tamberlik, no Mr. Sims Reeves, no Mr. George Perren — the 
incomparable Rubini, had lodgings opposite, once, to where we dwelt, 
at a shawl shop. I have watched the sedulous care which that 
eminent man took of his health, marvelled at the multitudinous folds 
of silk or woollen stuff, like the turban of an Asiatic, with which he 
encircled his invaluable throat when he took out-door exercise. I 
have seen, through his open window, the basso of basso's, Papa La- 
blache, the man with the lion's head, the Falstaffian abdomen, and the 
ten times stentorian lungs, eat maccaroni for twenty-seven consecutive 
minutes, till he seemed determined to outdo all the ribbon-swallowing 
conjurors who had ever lived. We used to say that he was practising 
for Leporello. He had a kindly heart, Papa Lablache, and preserved a 
kindly remembrance of the hearty English people, among whom he 
made his fortune. Though he would sometimes facetiously declare, that 
when his voice was no longer fit to be heard in a Continental city, he 
would come to England to settle, and sing " Fra questi sordi " among 
these deaf ones — for whom he would still be quite good enough — his 
heart never cooled towards the old country ; and, moribund at Naples, 
when the supreme Hour was fast arriving, he raised himself on his 
couch, and essayed to sing a song he loved very well — " Home ! sweet 
Home!" But, as the silver cord loosened, he murmured, " Mi manca 
la voce" — "My voice fails me;" and so died. 

To say nothing of a dreadful German basso, one of the regular 
line-of-battle ship voices, with 56-pounders on the first deck, who was 
once a next-door neighbour in the Quadrant, and when he used to call 
for his servant thus, " PaoOlo ! " shook the flower-pots on our own 
balcony ; or of an egregious fiddler, with long hair, who, in imitation 
of his predecessor, Paganini, gave out that he had sold himself to the 
devil, but who was, I believe, an arrant humbug with a mania for prac- 
tising in the open air — it may have been as a medium of advertisement 
— and used to attract large crowds in the street beneath listening to 

his complicated fiddlements. Yet I must spare a word for Madame I 

really forget whom, but it ended with " heim," I think — who had the 
six-and-thirty Austro-Sclavonic children who used to perform the 
mirror dance and other terpsichorean feats at her Majesty's Theatre, 



152 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

and whom she used to drill on the balcony like soldiers. They made 
a tremendous noise, these tiny figurantes, and in the hours of recreation 
were not unaccustomed to fight among themselves. Then Madame 
Somethingheim would sally forth on the balcony and cut savagely into 
their poor young bodies with a switch, and after much howling on their 
part, and chasing to and fro on hers, restore peace. 

The colonnades are as fruitful to me in recollections as the bal- 
conies. How many miles of daily walks have I gone over, the hand of 
a toddling little sister in mine, and with strict injunctions not to stray 
beyond the shadow of the columns, and with prohibitions, under dread- 
ful menaces, of ventering in Air Street on the one side or Vigo Lane on 
the other ! I wore, I remember, then, an absurd blue cloak, too short 
for me, and lined with red, and with a brass clasp somewhat jresembling 
the ornament on a cartouch box. This cloak chafed^and fretted me, 
and was the bane and terror of my existence ; for I knew, or fancied I 
knew, that every passer-by must know that it had never been made 
for me, which, indeed, it never had, having formerly been of far larger 
dimensions and the property of an officer in his Majesty's light infan- 
try. I believe that there was a domestic ukase promulgated for our 
benefit against crossing the road ; but we did cross it nevertheless, with 
many looks to the right and the left, not only to secure ourselves against 
threatening carriage wheels, but with reference to the possible appearance 
of parents and guardians. There w r as a delightful bird-stufFer's shop 
at the corner of a court, with birds of paradise, parrots, and humming- 
birds of gorgeous plumage, and strange creatures with white bodies and 
long yellow beaks and legs that terrified while they pleasured us. Then 
there was the funeral monument shop, with the mural tablets, the obelisks, 
the broken columns, the extinguished torches, and the draped urns in 
the window, and some with the inscriptions into the bargain, all ready 
engraved in black and white, puzzling us as to whether the tender 
husbands, devoted wives, and affectionate sons, to whom they referred, 
were buried in that grisly shop — it had a pleasant, fascinating terror 
about it, like an undertaker's, too. There was Swan and Edgar's, 
splendid and radiant, then as now, with brave apparel (how many times 
have I listened to the enthusiastic cheers of Swan and Edgar's young 
men, on the occasion of the proprietors giving their annual banquet to 
their employes ?), and even then replete with legends of dishonest fares, 
who caused a cab to halt at the Regent Street entrance, got out, said 
they would be back in a moment, and then darting through the crowded 



TWO P.M.— PEOM EEGEXT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 153 

shop, knavishly escaped at the Piccadilly end. There was the Italian 
statuary shop, with Canova's Graces, the crouching Venus, and the 
birds round a vase in alabaster ; and, above all, there was Mrs. Lips- 
combe's shop. — I don't mean the staymaker's, but the one next to that, 
the filter shop, with the astonishing machines for converting foul and 
muddy water, like gruel, thick and slab, into a sparkling, crystal 
stream. What a miracle it seemed to me that the goblet, filled to the 
brim, and yet into which, from the filter above, drops continually fell, 
never overflowed ! How I used to watch the little cork ball, kept in 
a continually bounding state of agitation by the perpendicular jet of 
water — watch it with almost breathless agitation, when, every now and 
then, the centre of gravity would: l)e lost, and the little ball would 
tumble in the basin beneath — the whole was covered by a glass shade 
—till, caught up once more, it would be sent in eddying whirls higher 
than ever ! I have seen the same experiment tried since with bigger 
balls — and of marble — very like twenty-four pounders — at the Grandes 
Eaux of Versailles, and in the gardens of Peterhoff. Stone Neptunes 
and Tritons surrounded the basin, and the jets of water, forty feet high, 
sent the spray flying in the faces of the spectators ; but none of these 
hydraulic displays ever came up, in my opinion, to the tiny squirt, 
with the little cork ball, underneath the glass shade, in Mrs. Lipscombe's 
window. Does she make stays and sell filters yet, I wonder ! What a 
curious mixture of avocations ! I know of none stranger since the 
names of M. Pen wick de Porquet and Mrs. Mary Wedlake were amal- 
gamated, and inquiries as to whether we " bruised our oats yet," were 
alternated with pressing questions of " Parlez vous Francais?" 

When I thus walked the Regent Quadrant, twenty years since, it 
was haunted by a class of men, now, I am happy to believe, almost 
entirely extinct. We have plenty of rogues in our body corporate yet. 
The turf has its blacklegs and touts ; the nightside of London is 
fruitful in "macemen," "mouchers," and " go-alongs." You must not 
be angry with me for using slang terms ; for did not a clergyman, at a 
highly-respectable institution, deliver a lecture on slang the other day, 
and did not the " Times " quote him? We are not free from skittle- 
sharps, card-cheats, " duffers," and ring-droppers ; nay, even at remote 
country race-courses, you may find remnants of the whilom swarming 
tribe of " charley-pitchers," the knavish gentry who pursue the games 
of " under seven or over seven," " red, black, leather and star," or 
inveigle the unwary with " three little thimbles and one small pea." 
But a stern and righteous legislation has put down nine-tenths of the 



154 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

infamous dens where any fool who chose to knock was fleeced to the 
last lock of wool. If a man wants to be vicious (in the gambling way) 
now 7 , he must have the entree to the abodes of vice, and a nodding 
acquaintance with the demon. A neophyte is not allowed to ruin 
himself how and where he likes. In the days of which I make mention, 
Regent Street and its purlieus abounded in open gambling houses, and 
to the skirts of these necessarily hung on a deboshed regiment of rogues, 
who made their miserable livings as runners, and decoy-ducks, and 
bravos to these abominable nests. They were called u Greeks," and 
two o'clock in the afternoon was their great time for turning out. 
From what infected holes or pestiferous garrets in Sherrard, or Brewer, 
or Rupert Street, they came, I know not ; but there they were at the 
appointed hour, skulking with a half sheepish, half defiant stride up 
and down Regent Street. Miserable dogs mostly, for all their fine 
clothes — always resplendently, though dirtily, attired. They wore 
great w 7 hite coats, shiny hats, and mosaic jewellery, which was just then 
coming into fashion. There was another fashion, in w T hich they very 
nearly succeeded, by adopting, to drive out, and make permanently 
disreputable : that of wearing moustaches. They used to swagger 
about, all lacquered, pomatumed, bejewelled, and begrimed, till I knew 
them all by sight and many of them by name and repute. There w r as 
Jack Cheetham, the lord's son, he who was thrown out of the window 
at Frascati's, and killed the Frenchman in the Bois de Vincennes. 
There was Captain Dollamore, who married the rich widow, and was 
arrested for her milliner's bill the week afterwards. There was Charley 
Skewball ; he was called Charley, but he was a baronet, had once been 
a gentleman, and was the greatest rogue unhung. Mr. Thackeray 
knows these men well. They are his Count Punters, Major Loders, 
M. de Caramboles, Hon. Algernon Deuceaces ; but they are extinct 
among us as a class, Titmarsh ; and simple people, who read your 
admirable novels, wonder whom the monsters are that you draw. They 
are dead ; they are at the hulks ; they are feebly punting at the few 
remaining gambling places on the Rhine : they flaunted in the bad 
prime of their manhood when I was a child. I have outgrown them ; 
and only now and then, w r hen I am out very late, collecting materials 
for " Twice Round the Clock/' I come upon a stray Jack or Charley — 
ragged and drivelling, his fine feathers all moulted or smirched, his 
occupation quite gone — who sidles up to me and calls me "Your 
honour," and with salt-rheumy lips, whimpers forth a supplication for 
"A penny towards a night's lodging." 



TWO P.M. — FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 155 

When our dear Queen Victoria was crowned, I began to lose sight 
of Regent Street — lost sight of it by degrees altogether, and came not 
back to it, as an observer, for many years. I rather avoided the place, 
for I had a bitter baptism of physical misery in the beginning of my 
working life : wanting food and raiment, not through prodigality (that 
came afterwards), but through sheer penury and friendlessness. And 
Regent Street, for all my querulous childhood, was associated with too 
many memories of happier days gone for ever. You know what the 
Italian rhymester says — 

" Xessun maggior dolore 
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice 
Nella Miseria." 

An Englishman has stolen the thought in some lines about " a 
sorrow's crown of sorrow," whose summing up I forget; but the sense 
of the passage is that the times are exceedingly hard, when, destitute 
and footsore, you pass by a house, and glance at the windows once 
lighted up by feasting in which you participated ; when you think of 
the rooms, once swept by the robe of the woman whom you loved, but 
that now, house, windows, rooms, are the portion of strangers. I say 
I went away from Regent Street, and came not back. There were 
reasons, I became of the Strand and Fleet Street a denizen, and 
Temple Bar entered into my soul. For I was affiliated to a great 
mystery of Masonry, called Literature, and had to follow the behests of 
my mother lodge. You don't see much of Regent Street, during your 
apprenticeship, if you begin at the lowermost degree, I can assure you. 
Now I am a master-mason, free and accepted, and can hold my own ; 
albeit I shall never be an Office-bearer, or " Grand," of my lodge, or 
rise to the superlatives of the Royal Arch or the Thirty-third. 

Behold Regent Street at two p.m., in the accompanying cartoon. Not 
without reason do I declare it the most fashionable street in the world. 
I call it not so for the aristocratic mansions it might possess ; for the 
lower parts of the houses are occupied as shops, and the furnished 
apartments are let, either to music or operatic celebrities or to un- 
ostentatious old bachelors. But the shops themselves are innately 
fashionable. There was a dash of utilitarianism mingled with the 
slightly Bohemian tinge of my Regent Street of twenty years ago ; 
there were bakers' shops, stationers, and opticians, who had models of 
steam engines in their windows. There was a grocer not above selling 
orange marmalade, brown sugar, and Durham mustard. I remember 



156 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




TWO P.M. — FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE. 157 

buying a penny cake of chocolate of him one morning ; but I find the 
shop now expanded into a magnificent emporium, where are sold wines, 
and spirits, sweetmeats and preserves, liqueurs and condiir nts, Bayonne 
ham, Narbonne honey, Bologna sausages, Russian cavi? c, Iceland moss, 
clotted cream, and terrifies o£ pate cle foie gras. Indeed, Regent Street 
is an avenue of superfluities — a great trunk-road in Vanity Fair. 
Fancy watchmakers, haberdashers, and photographers ; fancy stationers, 
fancy hosiers, and fancy staymakers; music shops, shawl shops, jewellers, 
French glove shops, perfumery, and point lace shops, confectioners and 
milliners : creamily, these are the merchants whose wares are exhibited 
in this Bezesteen of the world. 

Now, whatever can her ladyship, who has been shopping in Regent 
Street, have ordered the stalwart footman, who shut the carriage door 
with a resounding bang, to instruct the coachman to drive her to the 
Bank for? Her ladyship's own private bank is in a shiningly aristo- 
cratic street, by Cavendish Square, embosomed among green trees. 
She does not want to buy ribbons or lace on Ludgate Hill, artificial 
flowers in St. Paul's Churchyard, or fine linen in Cheapside. No ; she 
has a very simple reason for going into the city : Sir John, her liege 
lord, is on 'Change. He will be there from half-past two to three, at 
which hour High 'Change, as it may be called, closes, and she intends 
to call for him, and drive him to the West-end again. By your leave, 
we will jump up behind the carriage, heedless of the stalwart footman; 
for we are in the receipt of fern-seed, and invisible. 

Going on 'Change seems to be but a mechanical and mercantile 
occupation, and one that might with safety be entrusted to some 
confidential clerk j yet it is not so ; and the greatest magnates of 
commerce and finance, the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Huths, the 
legions of London's merchant-princes, are to be found chaffering in 
the quadrangle every day. In the old Exchange, they used to point 
out the particular column against which the elder Rothschild was wont 
to lean. They called the old man, too — marvellous diplomatist in 
financial combinations as he was — the Pillar of the Exchange. Tou 
know that the colonnades — whose ceilings are painted in such elaborate 
encaustic, and with such a signal result in ruin from damp and smoke — 
are divided into different promenades, variously designated, according 
to the nations of the merchants who frequent them. Thus — there are 
the Italian Walk, the Spanish Walk, the Portuguese Walk, the 
Danish Walk, and — a very notable walk it is too — the Greek Walk* 



158 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK, 

Here you may see ; jabbering and gesticulating, the crafty, keen-eyed, 
sallow-faced Smyrnians, Suliotes, Zantrites, and Fanariotes, indivi- 
duals much given to speculations in corn, in which, if report does 
them no injustice, they gamble most egregiously. 

Three o'clock strikes — or rather chimes — from the bell-tower of Mr. 
Tite's new building. The quadrangle of the Exchange is converted 
into an accurate model of the Tower of Babel. The mass of black- 
hatted heads — with here and there a white one, like a fleck of foam on 
the crest of a wave — eddies with violence to and fro. Men shout, 
and push, and struggle, and jostle, and shriek bargains into one 
another's ears. A stranger might imagine that these money and 
merchandise dealers had ^fallen out, and were about to fight ; but the 
beadle of the Exchange looks on calmly ; he knows that no breach of 
the peace will be committed, and that the merchants and financiers 
are merely singing their ordinary paean of praise to the great god 
Mammon. Surely — if there be not high treason in the thought — they 
ought to pull down Mr. Lough's statue of Queen Victoria, which 
stands in the centre of the quadrangle, and replace it by a neat effigy 
of the Golden Calf. 



THREE P.M.— DEBENHAM AND STORR'S AUCTION-ROOMS, 
AND THE PANTHEON BAZAAR- 

The travelled reader has visited that astonishing atelier of mosaics and 
pietra dura in Florence maintained at the charges of the late Grand- 
Duke of Tuscany, (he has been signally kicked off thronedom, since 
the first writing of these presents), and has watched with admiring 
amazement the patient ingenuity with which the artisans adjust the 
tiny little vitreous and metallic fragments, that, firmly imbedded in 
paste, make the fruits and flowers, the birds and angels of the mosaic. 
What an impossible task it is, apparently, to form the microscopic 
bits into comely shapeliness, symmetrical in form and glowing with 
rich colours ! yet how deftly the artists accomplish their task ! how the 
work grows beneath their nimble hands ! What astonishing memories 
these maitre mosaicists must have, remembering to a pin's point where 
the high lights on the petals of a rose will fall, and storing up in their 
minds archives of the eyelashes of the Madonna, precedents for every 



THREE P.M. — DEBEXHAM AND STORE S AUCTION -BOOMS. 159 

scintillation of the rajs in the golden nimbus round His head ! The 
mosaicists of Rome, and Florence, and Venice — though the glorious 
art has well-nigh died out in the Adriatic city — are the real adminis- 
trative reformers, after all. The right thing in the right place is their 
unvarying motto, and they are never found putting the round men in 
the square holes, or vice versa, 

I have been led into this train of thought by the contemplation of 
the exigencies of " Twice Round the Clock." Time, my slave for 
once, though he has been my stern and cruel master for years and 
years, and at whom 1 mean to throw a dart when this series shall be 
completed — Time, who is my bond servant, to fetch and carry, to hew 
wood and draw water for yet a span, has culled from the wild garden 
of Eternity, and thrown at my feet, a heterogeneous mass of hours, 
minutes, and seconds, and has said with a mocking subserviency — 
" There, my master, there are the hours of the day and night, and 
their minutest subdivisions ; try and paste them on your printed 
calendar ; try and reconcile your men and women to them ; try and 
apportion in its proper measure of time each grain of sand to the 
futile rivings and strivings of your conceited humanity. You have 
stumbled on from hour to hour since the sun was young, telling, with 
indifferent success, the good and bad deeds that are done in London as 
the relentless needle pushes round and round the dial. Here, then, is 
Three o'Clock in the Afternoon. Take it ; see what you can make of 
it, and much good may it do you ! " And as Time, or the vagrant 
thought I have embodied for the nonce, says this, he sticks his tongue 
into his cheek, as though he thought that three o'clock in the afternoon 
were rather a poser to me. 

Old man with the scythe and hour-glass, I defy thee ! I will admit 
that three o'clock post meridian, requires much deliberation and cogita- 
tion, in order to give the millions of human marionettes, of whom I 
hold, temporarily, the strings, their suitable employment ; but it is 
rather from a profusion than a paucity of scenes and things germane to 
the hour that I am embarrassed. At three ? 'Change is still going on, 
though its busy time, the acme of its excitement, is over. As the clock 
strikes four, the city of London is in full pant ; the clerks rush up 
Cheapside, and dive down the wealthy narrow lanes, their bursting bill- 
books (secured by leather-covered chains tied round their bodies) charged 
with " three months after date, please pay to the order," which they 
cram into letter-boxes for acceptance. The private banking houses in 



160 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Lombard Street are in an orderly uproar of finance. The rattling of 
shovels is incessant ; office-boys cast thousands of pounds, in notes, bills, 
and money, to the cashier, carelessly, across the counter, paying vast 
sums in to their masters' accounts ; and the mighty partners— -in checked 
neckerchiefs, buff waistcoats, and creaking boots : tremendous bank- 
partners, who are baronets, and members of Parliament, lords even — 
stalk back from 'Change, pay a farewell visit to the bank parlour, have 
a short but solemn confab with confidential subordinates, relative to 
coming transactions at the clearing-house, and then enter their carriages, 
and are borne to clubs, to the House of Commons, to Greenwich dinners, 
or, perchance, if they have a dinner-party at home, to their magnificent 
villas at Putney and Roehampton. What a colony of bankers dwell 
there ! the sommites of the haute finance seem to entertain as decided a 
partiality for the banks of the Thames, as the stockbrokers do for 
Brixton and Tulse Hill. Rare lives these money keepers lead — scattering 
in the West that which they gather in the East. Graperies, pineries, 
conservatories, ice-houses, dinner-parties, balls, picnics ; all these do 
they enjoy : they, their comely wives and handsome daughters. They 
marry into the aristocracy ! they have countesses and marchionesses in 
their list of partners. It is not so many centuries ago since the bankers 
were humble sellers of gold plate, dwelling in Lombard Street and the 
Chepe, and following the great courtiers round the quadrangle of the 
Exchange, intreating their lordships' honours to be allowed to keep their 
cash. Worthy individuals, however, are the majority of these bankers, 
and it is but very rarely indeed that they make ducks and drakes of 
their customers' moneys. They are not so very proud either, for all 
their splendid carriages and horses ; and here, upon my word, is Baron 
Lionel de Rothschild tearing up Ludgate Hill in a common Hansom 
cab ; but he, like the bad man whom Martial in an epigram de- 
clares not to be so much vicious as vice itself, is less a Banker than a 
Bank. 

As three o'clock grows old, and the tide of business shows unmis- 
takeable indices of an ebb at no very remote period, so far as the city is 
concerned, that same business is at the West-end in its extremest 
activity. The shops of the West Strand, Piccadilly, Oxford and Regent 
Streets, are thronged with customers, chiefly ladies ; the roadway is 
encumbered with carts and carriages ; and street avocations — the minor 
commerce of the mighty mart — are in full swing. Thick-necked and 
beetle-browed individuals, by courtesy called dog-fanciers, but who in 



THREE P.M. DEBENHAM AND STOKERS AUCTION-ROOMS. 161 

many cases might with as much propriety answer to the name of dog- 
stealers — forbidding-looking gentry, in coats of velveteen, with large 
mother-o'-pearl buttons, and waistcoats of the neat and unpretending 
moleskin — lurk about the kerbs of the purlieus of Regent Street and 
Waterloo Place (the police drive them away from the main thorough- 
fares), with the little " dawgs " they have to sell tucked beneath their 
arms, made doubly attractive by much washing with scented soap, and 
the further decoration of their necks with pink or blue ribbons. 
Here is the little snub-nosed King Charles — I hope the retrousse 
appearance of his nasal organ is not due to the unkind agency of 
a noose of whipcord — his feathery feet and tail, and his long 
silky ears, sweeping the clean summer pavement. Here is the New- 
foundland pup, with his bullet head and clubbed caudal-appendage, 
winking his stupid little eyes, and needing, seemingly, an enormous 
amount of licking into shape. Here is the bull-dog, in his full growth, 
with his legs bowed, his tail inclining to the spiral, his broad chest, 
thin flanks, defined ribs, moist nozzle, hare lip, bloodshot eyes, pro- 
truding fang, and symmetrical patch over one eye ; or else, in a state 
of puppyhood, peeping from his proprietor's side-pocket, all pink and 
white like a morose sucking-pig become a hermit. Here is the delightful 
little toy English terrier, with his jet-black coat, erect neck, and tan 
paws ; and here the genuine Skye, gray or brown, like an unravelled 
ball of worsted. See, too, grimacing at all who come to view, like a 
mulatto at a slave auction, who fancies himself good-looking, the 
accomplished French poodle, with his peaked nose, woolly wig, leggings, 
and tail band, and his horrible shaved, salmon-coloured body. He can 
dance ; he can perform gun- drill ; he can fall motionless, as though 
dead, at the word of command ; he can climb up a lamp-post, jump over 
a stick, hop on one leg, carry a basket in his mouth, and run away when 
he is told that a policeman is coming. You can teach him to do any- 
thing but love you. These, and good store of mongrels and half-breeds 
that the dealer would fain palm upon us as dogs of blood and price, frisk 
and fawn about his cord-trouser covered legs ; but where is the toy-dog 
par excellence, the playful, snappish, fractious., facetious, charming, 
utterly useless little dog, that, a quarter of a century since, was the 
treasure of our dowagers and our old maids ? Where is the Dutch pug ? 
Where is that Narcissus of canine Calibanism, with his coffee-coloured 
coat, his tail in a ring like the blue-nosed baboon's, his crisped morsels 
of ears, his black muzzle, his sharp, gleaming little teeth, his intensely 



162 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

red lips and tongue ? Is he extinct, like the lion-dog from Malta, the 
property of her Majesty the Queen, and the "last of his race," whom 
courtly Sir Edwin Landseer drew ? Are there no more Dutch pugs I 
They must exist somewhere. Cunning dealers owning recherche kennels 
in the New Road or at Battle Bridge, or attending recondite " show 
clubs," held at mysterious hostelries in the vicinity of Clerkenwell, 
must yet have some undoubted specimens of the pug for sale. There 
must be burghers yet, in the fat comfortable houses at Loo by the 
Hague, or in the plethoric, oozy vicinage of Amsterdam— there must 
be Tietjens, and Tenbroecks, and van Kamms, and van Bummels, whose 
pride it is, amidst their store of tulip bulbs, china vases, cabinet pictures 
by Breughel and Ostade, lacquer- work from Japan, and spice-boxes from 
Java, to possess Dutch pugs in the flesh. But the creature is seen no 
more in London streets, and we must be content with him on Hogarth's 
canvases, in Linacres engravings, or modelled in china, as we see him 
in the curiosity shops. I have indeed seen the elephant — I mean the 
Dutch pug — alive and snarling, once in my life. He was led by a 
bright scarlet ribbon — scarlet, mind, not pink or blue — attached to his 
silver collar ; and there must have been something in the appearance of 
my youthful legs (I was but five, and they were bare, plump, and 
mottled) that excited his carnivorous propensities, for, long as is the 
lapse of time, I remember that he rushed at me like a coffee-coloured 
tiger. His mistress was a Duchess, the grandest, handsomest Duchess 
that had ever lived (of course, I except Georgina of Devonshire) since 
the days of that Grace of Queensberry of whom Mr. Thackeray was good 
enough to tell us in the " Virginians." She, my Duchess, wore a hat 
and feathers, diamonds, and a moustache — a downy nimbus round her 
mouth, like that which Mr. Philip insinuates rather than paints in his 
delightful Spanish girls' faces. I see her now, parading the cliff at 
Brighton, with her black velvet train — yes, madam, her train — held up 
by a page. She was the last duchess who drove down to Brighton in a 
coach and six. She was the last duchess who at Twelfth-night parties 
had a diamond ring baked in the cake which was to be distributed by 
lots. Before she came to her coronet, she had been a singing woman at 
a playhouse, had married a very foolish rich old banker, and, at his 
death, remarried a more foolish and very poor duke. But she was an 
excellent woman, and the relative to whom she left the bulk of her 
wealth, is one of the most charitable, as I am also afraid she is one of the 
most ermuyee, ladies in England. I am proud of my reminiscence. It 



THREE P.]tf DEBENHAM AND STOKRS AUCTION-ROOMS. 163 

is not every one that has seen a Dutch pug and the Duchess of St. Albans 
alive. 

Body of me ! here am I wasting my time among the dog-fanciers — 
(when the name of the man in the iron mask, the authorship of 
" Junius," the murderer of Caspar Hauser, and the date of the laws of 
Menu, shall be known, it shall also be patent to all men why trafficking 
in dogs and horses seem necessarily connected with roguery) — here am 
I descanting on poodles and pug-dogs, when, with quick observant eyes, 
I should be noting the hundred little trades that are being driven at 
three o'clock in the afternoon. The feverish industry — the untiring- 
perseverance — the bitter struggle, and all for yon scanty morsel of 
bread, and a few inches of space for repose at night in a fourpenny 
lodging-house ! Follow the kerb-stone from the Count v Fire Office to 
St. Martin's Lane. See the itinerant venders of catch-' em-alive-o's, of 
cheap toys, of quires of writing-paper, sealing-wax and envelopes, all 
for the small charge of one penny ; see the industrials who have 
walking-sticks, umbrellas, gutta-percha whips, aerated balls, locomotive 
engines and statuettes of Napoleon in glass phials, that make us 
wonder, as with flies in amber, however they, the engines and statuettes, 
got there; the women who have bouquets to dispose of — how many 
times have they been refreshed beneath the pump, this droughty day % — 
the boys and girls in looped and windowed raggedness striving to sell 
fruit, flowers, almanacks, pencils, fusees — anything, to keep the wolf 
from the door. He is always at the door, that wolf — always at that 
yawning portal, and his name is Famine. The worst of the brute is, 
that he comes not alone — that he has a friend, a brother wolf with 
him, who hankers round the corner, and is always ready to pop in at 
the door at the slightest suspicion of a summons. This wolf is a full- 
paunched rogue, and liberal, too, of succulent, hut poisoned, food to his 
friends. This is the thief wolf, the gallows wolf, the Calcraft wolf. 
Lupus camifex. He keeps up an incessant whining baying, which, 
being interpreted, means, " Work no more. See how hard the life is. 
What's the good of working 1 Come and Steal." Look here, my lords 
and gentlemen — look here, my right honourable friends — look here, 
my noble captains — look here, your honours' worships — come out of 
your carriages, come out of your clubs, come out of your shooting-boxes 
in the Highlands, and your petites maisons in the Regent's Park, and 
look at these faded and patched creatures. I tell you that they have 
to rise early and go to bed late ; that they have to work hours and 



164 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

hours before they can turn one penny. They have never been taught ; 
they are seldom fed, and more seldom washed ; but they don't steal. 
I declare that it is a wonder they do not — a marvel and a miracle they 
do not. They remain steadfastly honest ; for, in the troubled sea of 
their lives, Almighty Mercy has planted a Pharos, or light-house. The 
night is pitchy black oft enough ; the light revolves — is for a time 
invisible — and the poor forlorn, tempest-torn man watches the blank 
horizon in all but mute despair ; but the blessed gladdening gleam 
comes round again, as we have all seen it many a time on the ocean, 
and, sighing, the honest man resolutely keeps on his course. 

Following the kerb-stone myself from the before-mentioned County 
Eire Office to St. Martin's Lane, and passing through Leicester Square 
— which, what with the Alhambra " Palace" and its hideous Ameri- 
can posters, the Great Globe, and the monster cafes chantants, I begin 
to be rather uncertain about recognising — passing, not without some 
inward trembling, the stick shop at the corner of the lane, while on 
either side of the portal those peculiarly ugly carved clubs — the very 
Gog and Magog of walking-stickery — keep watch and ward, I cut 
dexterously through the living torrent that is flowing from Charing 
Cross toward St. Giles's (they were villages once, Charynge and Saint 
Gyles' s — ha ! ha !) and commence the ascent of New Street, a feat well 
nigh as disagreeable, if not as perilous, as that of Mont Blanc. I hate 
this incorrigible little thoroughfare ; this New Street. It is full of bad 
smells, mangy little shops, obstructions, and bad characters. There is 
a yawning gin-palace at its south-western extremity. The odours of its 
eating-houses — especially of a seedy little French pension lourgeoise 
about half way up — are displeasing to my nostrils. The cigars vended 
in New Street are the worst in London, and the sweetstuff shops are 
mobbed — yes, mobbed — by children in torn pinafores who never have 
any pocket handkerchiefs. Of late days, photographers have hung out 
their signs and set up their lenses in New Street ; and if, passing 
through the street, you escape being run over by a wagon or upset by 
an inebriated market-gardener, you run great risks of being forcibly 
dragged into the hole tenanted by a photographic " artist," and 
" focussed," willy nilly. Thoroughfares, almost inconceivably tortuous, 
crapulous, and infamous, debouch upon New Street. There is that 
Rose Street, or Rose Alley, where, if I be not wrong in my topography, 
John Dryden, the poet, was waylaid and cudgelled ; and there is a 
wretched little haunt called Bedfordbury, a devious, slimy little reptile 



THREE P.M. — DEBENHAM AND ST0RR S AL T CTTON-ROOMS. 165 

of a place, whose tumble-down tenements and reeking courts spume forth 
plumps of animated rags, such as can be equalled in no London 
thoroughfare save Church Lane, St. Giles's. I don't think there are 
five windows in Bedfordbury with a whole pain of glass in them. Rags 
and filthy loques are hung from poles, like banners from the outward 
walls. There is an insolent burgher of Bedfordbury, who says I owe 
him certain stivers. Confound the place ! its rags, its children, its red 
herrings, and tobacco-pipes crossed in the windows, its boulders of 
whitening, and its turpentine-infected bundles of firewood ! 

The pursuit of New Street, thus maledicted, brings me to King 
Street, Covent Garden, a broad, fair, well-conducted public way, against 
which I have no particular prejudice ; for it leads up to Covent Gar- 
den Market, which I love \ and it contains within its limits the Gar- 
rick Club, 

Before, however, you come to the Garrick, before you come to the 
coffee-shop where there is that strange collection of alarming-looking 
portraits ; before you come to Mr. Kilpack's cigar divan and bowling- 
alley, you arrive at the door of an unpretending, though roomy mansion, 
the jambs of whose portals are furnished with flattering catalogues re- 
lative to "this day's sale," and the pavement before whose frontage is 
strewn with fragments of straw and shreds of carpeting. It is strange, 
too, if you do not see half a dozen or so burly-looking porters lounging 
about the premises, and a corresponding number of porter's knots, the 
straw stuffing bulging occasionally from rents in their sides, decorating 
the railings, as the pint pots do the iron barriers of the licensed victual- 
lers. This mansion contains the great auction-room of Messrs. Deben- 
ham and Storr. Let us enter without fear. There is scarcely, I think, 
so interesting an exhibition in London ; yet, in contradistinction to the 
majority of London exhibitions, there is nothing to pay. 

In this monstrous amalgam of microcosms, London, a man may, if 
he will only take the trouble, find that certain places, streets, rooms, 
peculiar spots and set apart localities, are haunted by classes of people 
as peculiar as the localities they affect, and who are seldom to be found 
anywhere else. In the early forenoon, long before business hours com- 
mence, the benches of the piazza of the Royal Exchange have their 
peculiar occupants — lank, mystic-looking men, mostly advanced in 
years, and shiny in threadbare blackclothdom. They converse with 
one another seldom, and when they do so, it is but in furtive whispers, 
the cavernous mouth screened by the rugose hand, with its knotted 



166 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

cordage of veins and its chalkstoned knuckles, as though the whisper 
were of such commercial moment that the locutor feared its instanta- 
neous transport to the ears of Rothschild or Baring, and the consequent 
uprising or downfalling of stocks or corn, silk or tallow. Who are 
these men, these Exchange ghosts, who haunt the site of Sir Thomas 
Gresham's old " Burse?" Are they commission agents come to decay, 
bankrupt metal brokers, burnt-out, uninsured wharfingers, lame ducks 
of the Stock Exchange, forced even to " waddle " from the purlieus of 
Capel Court? There they sit day after day — their feet (lamentably 
covered with boots of fastidious bigness, for, alas ! the soles are warped, 
the sides crack, the heels are irrevocably lopsided) beating the devil's 
tattoo on the stone pavement, their big cotton umbrellas distilling a 
mouldy moisture, or a pair of faded Berlin gloves, quite gone and 
ruined at the fingers, lying on the bench beside them. Their battered 
hats oscillate on their heads through overloading with tape-tied papers, 
and oft-times, from the breast-pocket of their tightly-buttoned coats, 
they drag leathern pocketbooks, white and frayed at the edges like the 
seams of their own poor garments, from which pocketbooks they draw 
greasy documents, faded envelopes, sleezy letters, which have been 
folded and refolded so often that they seem in imminent danger of 
dropping to pieces like an over-used passport at the next display. 
With what an owl-like, an oracular , look of wisdom they consult these 
papers ! What are they all about ? The bankruptcy of their owners 
thirty years ago, and the infamous behaviour of the official assignees 
(dead and buried years since) ? their early love correspondence ? their 
title-deeds to the estates in Ayrshire, and the large pasture lands in 
the Isle of 'Skye? Who knows? But you never see these ghostly 
time-waiters anywhere but on 'Change, and out of 'Change hours. 
Directly the legitimate business of that place of commercial re-union 
commences, they melt away imperceptibly, like the ghost of Hamlet's 
father at cock-crow, coming like shadows and so departing. 

The dreadful night dens and low revelling houses of past midnight 
London, the only remnants left among us of the innumerable " finishes' ' 
and saloons and night-cellars of a former age, have also their peculiar 
male population, stamped indelibly with the mint-mark of the place, 
and not to be found out of it, save in the dock of the adjacent police- 
court. Where these rujfiani, these copper captains and cozening buz- 
gloaks, are to be found during the day, or even up to midnight — for in 
the gallery even of any decent theatre they would not be admitted — 



THREE P.M. DEBENHAM AND STORE- S AUCTION-ROOMS. 167 

must remain a secret ; perhaps, like the ghoules and afrits, the bats and 
dragons of fable, they haunt ruinous tombs, deserted sepulchres, church- 
yards sealed up long since by the Board of Health ; but so soon as two 
or three o'clock in the morning arrives, they are to be found wherever 
there are fools to be fleeced or knaves to plot with. You study their 
lank hair and stained splendid stocks, their rumpled jay's finery and 
rascal talk, their cheap canes and sham rings \ but they, too, fade away 
with the dawn — how, no man can say, for the meanest cabman would 
scorn to convey them in his vehicle— and are not beheld any more till 
vagabondising time begins again. 

" Supers," too — or theatrical supernumeraries, to give them their 
full title — are a decidedly distinctive and peculiar race ; and though 
reported, and ordinarily believed, to exercise certain trades and handi- 
crafts in the daytime, such as shoemaking, tailoring, bookbinding, 
and the like, my private belief is that no " super" could exist long in 
any atmosphere remote from behind the scenes or the vicinity of the 
stage-door of a theatre. Look, too, at the audience of a police-court : 
look at the pinched men who persist in attending the sittings of the 
Insolvent Debtors' Court in Portugal Street, or hang about the dingy 
tavern opposite, and who consume with furtive bites Abernethy biscuits 
and saveloys, half hidden in the folds of blue cotton pocket-handker- 
chiefs. Yes, the proverb reads aright — as many men, so many minds ; 
and each man's mind, his idiosyncrasy, leads him to frequent a certain 
place till he becomes habituated to it, and cannot separate himself 
therefrom. There are your men who delight in witnessing surgical 
operations, and those who never miss going to a hanging. There is a 
class of people who have a morbid predilection for attending coroners' 
inquests, and another who insist upon going to the Derby, be the 
weather wet or dry, cold or hot, though they scarcely know a horse's 
fore from his hind legs, and have never a sixpenny bet on the field. 
There is a class who hang about artists' studios, knowing no more of 
painting than Mr. Wakley does of poetry ; there are the men you meet 
at charity dinners, the women you meet at marriages and christenings. 
Again, there is a class of eccentrics, who, like the crazy Earl of Ports- 
mouth, have an invincible penchant for funerals — " black jobs," as the 
mad lord used to call them ; and finally, there are the people who 
haunt Sales bv Auction. 

"Walk into Debenham and Storr's long room, and with the exercise of 
a little judgment and keenness of observation, you will be enabled to 



168 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




THREE P. 31. DEBENHAM AND STOKES AUCTION-ROOMS. 169 

recognise these amateurs of auctions in a very short space of time, and 
to preserve them in your memory. They very rarely bid, they yet 
more rarely have anything knocked down to them ; indeed, to all 
appearances, the world does not seem to have used them well enough to 
allow them to buy many superfluities, yet there they stand patiently, 
hour after hour, catalogue in hand — they are always possessed of 
catalogues — ticking off the amount of the bids, against the numbers 
of the articles which they never buy ; you should remark, too, and 
admire, the shrewd, knowing, anxious scrutiny which they extend to 
the articles which are hung up round the room, or which are held up 
for inspection by the porter, as the sale proceeds. They seem actually 
interested in the cut of a Macintosh, in the slides of a telescope, in the 
triggers of a double-barrelled gun ; they are the first to arrive at, the 
last to leave the Sale ; and then, in the close of the afternoon, they 
retire, with long-lingering footsteps, as though — like the gentleman 
for whom a judge of the land and twelve honest men had settled that a 
little hanging was about the best thing that could be done, and who 
so often fitted the halter, took leave, and traversed the cart — they were 
" loath to depart," which I am willing to believe they are. I imagine 
to myself, sometimes, that these men are cynical philosophers, who 
delight in the contemplation of the mutabilities of property ; who 
smile grimly — within their own cynical selves — and hug themselves at 
the thought, not only that flesh is grass, that sceptre and crown must 
tumble down, and kings eat humble pie, but that the richest and the 
rarest gems and gew-gaws, the costliest garments, the bravest panoplies, 
must come at last to the auctioneer's hammer. 

Perhaps you would like to know what they are selling by auction at 
Debenhani and Storr's this sultry July afternoon. I should very much 
like to know what they are not selling. Stay, to be just, I do not hear 
any landed estates or advowsons disposed of : you must go to the 
Auction Hart in Bartholomew Lane if you wish to be present at such 
Simoniacal ceremonies ; and, furthermore, horses, as you know, are 
in general sold at Tattersall's, and carriages at Aldridge's repository in 
St. Martin's Lane. There are even auctioneers, I am told, in the 
neighbourhood of Wapping and Ratcliffe Highway, who bring lions 
and tigers, elephants and ourangoutangs, to the hammer ; and, finally, 
I must acquit the respectable firm, whose thronged sale-room I have 
edged myself into, of selling by auction such trifling matters as human 
flesh and blood, 

31 



170 TWICE SOUND THE CLOCK. 

But from a chest of drawers to a box of dominoes, from a fur coat to 
a silver-mounted horsewhip, from a carpenter's plane to a case of 
lancets, from a coil of rope to a silk neck-tie, from a dragoon's helmet 
to a lady's thimble, there seems scarcely an article of furniture or 
wearing apparel, of use or superfluity, that is not to be found here. 
Glance behind that counter running down the room, and somewhat 
similar to the narrow platform in a French douane, where the luggage 
is deposited to be searched. The porters move about among a hetero- 
geneous assemblage of conflicting articles of merchandise ; the clerk 
'who holds aloft the gun or the clock, or the sheaf of umbrellas, or 
whatever other article is purchased, hands it to the purchaser, when it 
is knocked down to him, with a confidential wink, if he knows and 
trusts that customer, with a brief reminder of " money " and an out- 
stretched palm, signifying that a deposit in cash must be forthwith paid 
in case such customer be not known to him, or, what will sometimes 
happen, better known than trusted. And high above all is the auctioneer 
in his pulpit, with his poised hammer, the Jupiter Tonans of the sale. 

And such a sale ! Before I have been in the room a quarter of an 
hour, I witness the knocking down of at least twenty dress coats, and 
as many waistcoats and pairs of trousers, several dozen shirts, a box of 
silk handkerchiefs, two ditto of gloves, a roll of best Saxony broadcloth, 
a piece of Genoa velvet, six satin dresses, twelve boxes of artificial 
flowers, a couple of opera glasses, a set of ivory chessmen, eighteen 
pairs of patent leather boots— not made up — several complete sets of 
carpenters' tools, nine church services, richly bound, a carved oak 
cabinet, a French bedstead, a pair of china vases, a set of harness, 
three boxes of water colours, eight pairs of stays, a telescope, a box of 
cigars, an enamel miniature of Napoleon, a theodolite, a bronze 
candelabrum, a pocket compass, twenty-four double-barrelled fowling- 
pieces (I quote verbatim and seriatim from the catalogue), a parrot cage, 
three dozen knives and forks, two plated toast-racks, a Turkey carpet, 
a fishing-rod, winch, and eelspear, by Cheek, a tent by Benjamin 
Edgington, two dozen sheepskin coats, warranted from the Crimea, a 
silver-mounted dressing-case, one of eau-de-Cologne, an uncut copy of 
Macaulay's " History of England," a cornet-a-piston, a buhl inkstand, 
an eight-day clock, two pairs of silver grape-scissors, a poonah-painted 
screen, a papier-mache work-box, an assortment of variegated floss-silk, 
seven German flutes, an ivory casket, two girandoles for wax candles, 
an ebony fan, five flat-irons, and an accordion. 



THREE P.M. DEBENH1M AND STORR S AUCTION-ROOMS. 171 

There ! I am fairly out of breath. The mere perusal of the 
catalogue is sufficient to give one vertigo. But whence, you will ask, 
the extraordinary incongruity of the articles sold ] We know w r hen a 
gentleman "going abroad" or " relinquishing housekeeping," and who 
is never — Oh dear, no ! — in any manner of pecuniary difficulty, honours 
Messrs. So-and-So with instructions to sell his effects, what we may 
look forward to when the carpets are hung from the windows with the 
sale-bills pinned thereon, and the auctioneer establishes a temporary 
rostrum on the dining-room table. We know that after the " elegant 
modern furniture " will come the " choice collection of pictures, statuary, 
and virtu" then the " carefully-selected library of handsomely-bound 
books," and then the "judiciously assorted stock of first-class wines." 
But what gentleman, what tradesman, what collector of curiosities and 
odds and ends even, could have brought together such an astounding 
jumble of conflicting w r ares as are gathered round us to-day ! The 
solution of the enigma lies in a nutshell, and shall forthwith be made 
manifest to you. The articles sold this afternoon are all pawnbroker £ 
pledges unredeemed, and this is one of Messrs. Debenham and Storr's 
quarterly sales, which the law hath given, and which the court awards. 
Your watch, which your temporary pecuniary embarrassments may 
have led you to deposit w T ith a confiding relative thirteen months since, 
which your renewed pecuniary embarrassments have precluded you 
from redeeming, and which your own unpardonable carelessness has 
made you even forget to pay the interest upon, may be among that 
dangling bundle of time-pieces which the clerk holds up, and on which 
the auctioneer is, at this very moment, descanting. 

The eloquence of the quarterly sale does not by any means resemble 
the flowery Demosthenic style first brought into fashion among 
auctioneers by the distinguished George Robins. Here are no ponds 
to be magnified by rhetoric into fairy lakes, no little hills to be amplified 
into towering crags, no shaven lawns to be described as " boundless 
expanses of verdure.'' The auctioneer is calm, equable, concise, but 
firm, and the sums realised by the sale of the articles are reasonable — 
so reasonable, in fact, that they frequently barely cover loan and interest 
due to the pawnbroker. But that is his risk ; and such is the power of 
competition in trade, that a London pawnbroker will often lend more 
upon an article than it w f ill sell for. In the provinces the brethren of 
the three golden balls are more cautious; and in Dublin they are 
shamefully mean in their advances to their impoverished clients ; but it 



172 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

is in Paris par excellence, that the great national pawning establishment, 
the Mont de Piete, manifests the most decided intention, by the 
microscopic nature of its loans, of taking care of itself. 

Much noise, much dust, and an appreciable amount of confusion, 
must necessarily, my patient friend and companion, exist at every 
auction, though it must be admitted, to the credit of Messrs. Debenham 
and Storr, that their proceedings are always marked by as much 
regularity and decorum as the nature of their transactions will admit 
of. For auctioneering is the Bohemianism of commerce ; and whether 
it be the purser of a man-of-war selling the effects of a deceased Jack 
Tar before the mainmast ; an impromptu George Robins, with a very 
large beard, knocking down red flannel shirts, jack-boots, and gold 
rocking-cradles at the Ballarat diggings ; my former friends, the fish 
salesmen, brandishing their account -books over their piscine merchan- 
dise in Billingsgate ; or the courtly Robins, in propria persona^ 
eloquently bepuffing the Right Hon. the Earl of Cockletops's broad 
acres, which he has been honoured with instructions to sell, in con- 
sequence of the insolvency of his Lordship, there always enters into the 
deed of selling something wild, something picturesque, and something 
exciting. It is strange, too, how soon the virtues of auctioneering are 
apt to degenerate into vices ; and how thin a barrier exists between its 
legitimate commercial business and an imbroglio of roguish chaf- 
fering. 

So is it on the turf. There, on the velvet verdant lawn before the 
Grand Stand at Epsom, sits, or stands, or reclines, my Lord the 
immaculate owner of Podasokus or Cynosure. Betting-book in hand, 
he condescends to take the odds from Mr. Jones, who may have been a 
journeyman carpenter ten years since, but whose bare word is good 
now for a hundred thousand pounds. The peer and the plebeian bet 
together amicably ; they respect their parole agreements \ they would 
disdain to admit the suspicion of a fraud in their transactions ; they 
are honourable men both, though they might, I acknowledge, do some- 
thing better for a livelihood than gamble on the speed of a racehorse ; 
yet, all honourable men as they are on the turf, within two feet of 
them, outside the Grand Stand railing, are some hundreds of turfites 
depending for their existence upon exactly the same means — betting, 
but who cheat, and lie, and cozen, and defraud, and swagger about in 
an impudent boastfulness of roguery, till the most liberal-minded 
member of the non-cheating community must regret, almost, that the 



THEEE P.M. THE PANTHEON BAZAAE. 173 

old despotic punishments are gone out of vogue, and that a few of 
these rogues' ears cannot be nailed to the winning post, a few of them 
tied up to the railings of the Grand Stand and soundly swinged, and a 
few more placed in neat pillories, or commodious pairs of stocks beneath 
the judge's chair. Like the honourable betters inside, and the thievish 
touts outside, electioneering is apt to suffer by the same disreputable 
companionships ; and within a few stones' throw of Garraway's, there 
may be pullulating an infamous little watch-box of dishonesty, where 
a thick-lipped, sham Caucasian auctioneer, is endeavouring, with the 
aid of confederates as knavish as he, to palm off worthless lamps, 
lacquered tea-trays, teapots of tin sophisticated to the semblance of 
silver, and rubbishing dressing-cases, upon unwary country visitors, 
or even upon Cockneys, who, were they to live to the age of Me- 
thuselah, would never be thoroughly initiated into the ways of the 
town. 

And now stand on one side : the auction company — it is nearly four 
o'clock — stream forth from Debenham's. I spoke of the amateurs of 
auctions — the people who persist in attending them, but who rarely 
appear to become purchasers of anything. There is not much difficulty, 
however, in discerning who the people are who are really bidding and 
really buying. Here they come, bagged and bundled, and gesticulating 
and jabbering. They are Jews, my dear. They are the hook-nosed, 
ripe-lipped, bright-eyed, cork-screw ringleted, and generally oleaginous- 
looking children of Israel. They cluster, while in the sale-room, 
round the auctioneer and his clerk, who (the last) seems to have an 
intimate acquaintance with them all. They nod and chuckle, and 
utter Hebrew ejaculations, and seem, all the while that the sale is 
proceeding, to be in an overboiling state of tremour and nervous excite- 
ment. A sale by auction is to them as good — better — than a play ; so 
is everything on this earth, in, about, or in the remotest connection 
with which, there is something that can be bought, or something that 
can be sold, or something that can be higgled for. If ever you attend 
auctions, my friend and reader, I should advise you not to bid against 
the Jews. If it seem to you that any one of the Caucasian Arabs has 
set his mind upon the acquisition of an article, let him bid for it and 
buy it, a' goodness name ; for if you meddle with the matter, even by 
the augmentation of a sixpence, he will so bid and bid against you, 
that he will bid you, at last, out of your hat, and out of your coat, 
and out of your skin, and out of your bones ; even as the cunning man 



174 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

of Pyqimg, that Diedrich Knickerbocker tells of. questioned Anthony 
van Corlear, the trumpeter, out of his fast-trotting nag, and sent him 
home mounted on a vile calico mare. 

There are some here, who are dissatisfied with the bargains they 
have made, and are squabbling in a lively manner on the foot pave- 
ment. Mark, I entreat you, among them, those dusky-faced females, 
mostly given to the loose and flabby order of corpulency, who are 
shabbily dressed, yet with a certain tendency to the wearing of lace 
bonnets, and faded cashmeres, and who have moreover a decided pen- 
chant for golden bangles and earrings, and rings with large stones 
that do not shine. You cannot make up your mind at once that they 
are Jewesses, because they have a conflicting facial resemblance to 
Gipsies. During the sale they have been reclining, not to say squat- 
ting, on the broad goods counter in shabby state, like second-hand 
sultanas, making bids in deep contralto voices, or mysteriously trans- 
mitting them through the intermediary of glib Jew boys with curly 
heads. These commercial females must be reckoned among the 
million and one mysteries of London. I imagine them to be the 
ladies dwelling in remote suburbs or genteel neighbourhoods gone 
to decay, who, in the columns of the " Times," are aways expressing 
a desire to purchase second-hand wearing apparel, lace, jewellery, and 
books, for the purpose of exportation to Australia, and for which they 
are always willing to pay ready money, even to the extent of remit- 
ting post-office orders in immediate return for parcels from the country. 
They, too, I think, must keep the mysterious " ladies' wardrobe shops" 
know T n to the Abigails in aristocratic families, and which are, a little 
bird has told me, not altogether unknown to the patrician occupants 
of the noblest mansions of the realm. Thus, there seems to be a per- 
petual round of mutation and transmutation going on among clothes. 
The natural theory of reproduction here seems carried to its most 
elaborate condition of practice ; and, bidding adieu to Debenham and 
Storr's, the chaffering Jews, and the dusky ladies' wardrobe women, 
my mind wanders to Rag Fair, thence to the emporium of Messrs. 
Moses and Son, and thence, again, to Stultze, Nugee, and Buckmaster, 
and I end in a maze of cogitation upon the " Sartor Resartus " of 
Thomas Carry le. 

Come, let us struggle into the open, and inhale the flower-laden 
breeze that is wafted from Covent Garden market. There, we are in 
King Street; and, I declare, there is my aunt Sophy's brougham, 
with my identical aunt and my cousin Polly in the interior of the 



THREE P.M. THE PANTHEON BAZAA&. 175 

vehicle. The}' are bound, I will go bail, either to the Soho Bazaar or 
to the Pantheon, in Oxford Street. Jump up behind ; fear no warning 
cry of " whip behind" addressed to the coachman by malevolent street 
boy, disappointed in his expectations of an eleemosynary ride. Re- 
member, we are invisible ; and as for the dignity of the thing, the 
starched, buckramed, and watchspringed-hooped skirts of my female 
relatives take up at least three and a half out of the four seats in the 
brougham : the remaining moiety of a place being occupied, as of 
right, by my aunt's terrier, Jip, who threatens vengeance with all his 
teeth on any one who should venture to dispossess him. 

I told you so. They have passed Charles Street, Soho, whisked 
by the Princess's Theatre, and alighted beneath the portico of the 
Pantheon. The affable beadle (whose whiskers, gold-laced hat-band, 
livery buttons, and general deportment, are as superior to those the 
property of the beadle of the Burlington Arcade, as General Wash- 
ington to General Walker) receives the ladies with a bow. He is 
equalled, not surpassed, in polished courtesy, by his brother beadle at 
the conservatory entrance in Great Marlborough Street, who bows 
ladies out with a dignified politeness worthy of the best days of 
Richelieu and Lauzun. 

So into the Pantheon, turning and turning about in that Hampton- 
Court-like maze of stalls, laden with pretty gimcracks, toys, and papier 
mache trifles for the table, dolls and childrens' dresses, wax flowers 
and Berlin and crotchet work, prints, and polkas, and women's ware 
of all sorts. Up into the gallery, where you may look down upon a 
perfect little ant-hill of lively industry. And, if you choose, into that 
queer picture-gallery, where works by twentieth-rate masters have 
been quietly accumulating smoke and dust for some score years, and 
where the only conspicuous work is poor shiftless Haydon's big 
nightmare picture of "Lazarus." They have lately added, I believe, 
a photographic establishment to the picture-gallery of the Pantheon ; 
but I am doubtful as to its success. It requires a considerable amount 
of moral courage to ascend the stairs, or to enter the picture depart- 
ment at all. The place seems haunted by the ghosts of bygone 
pictorial mediocrities. It is the lazar-house of painting — an hospital 
of incurables in art. 

I am not aware whether any of my present generation of readers 
—people are born, and live and die, so fast now-a-days — remember 
a friend of mine who dwelt in an out-of-the-way place called Tatty- 
boy's Rents, and whom I introduced to the public by the name of 



176 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Fripanelli. He was a music-master — very old, and poor, and ugly ; 
almost a dwarf in stature, wrinkled, decrepit ; lie wore a short 
cloak, and the boys called him "Jocko;" indeed, he was not at 
all unlike a baboon in general appearance. But Fripanelli in his 
time — a very long time ago — though now brought to living in a back 
slum, and teaching the daughters of chandlers' shopkeepers, had 
been a famous professor of the tuneful art. He knew old Gaddi — 
Queen Caroline's Gaddi — well : he had been judged worthy to preside 
at the pianoforte at Velluti's musical classes ; and he had even written 
the music to a ballet, which was performed with great eclat at the 
King's Theatre, and in which the celebrated Gambalonga had danced. 
To me, Frip. had an additional claim to be regarded with something 
like curiosity mingled with reverence ; for he had positively been, in 
the halcyon days of youth, the manager of an Italian opera company, 
the place of whose performance was — wherever do you think ? — the 
Pantheon, in Oxford Street. Now, as I stand in the lively bazaar, 
with the prattling little children, and the fine flounced ladies, I 
try to conjure back the days when Fripanelli was young, and when 
the Pantheon was a theatre. From here in the vestibule — where the 
ornamented flower-pots, and the garden-chairs of complicated con- 
struction, and the busts with smoky cheeks and noses, and marvel- 
lously clubbed heads of hair, have their locus standi — from here sprang 
the grand staircase. There was no Haydon's picture of Lazarus for 
our grandfathers and grandmothers in hoops and powder — you must 
remember that Fripanelli looks at least two hundred and fifty years 
of age, and is currently reported to be ninety* — to stare at as they 
trotted up the degrees. Yonder, in the haven of bygone mediocrities 
in the picture-gallery, may have been the crush-room ; the rotunda at 
the back of the bazaar, where now the vases of wax-flowers glimmer 
in a perpetual twilight, must have been the green-room ; the con- 
servatories were dressing-rooms, and the stage door was undoubtedly 
in Great Marlborough Street. How I should have liked to witness 
the old pigtail operas and ballets performed at the Pantheon, when 
Fripanelli and the century were young. " Iphigenia in Aulis," 
" Ariadne in Naxos," " Orestes and Pylades," " Daphnis and Ohloe," 
" Bellerophon," " Eurydice," the " Clemency of Titus," the " Misfor- 
tunes of Darius," and the " Cruelty of Nero" — these were the lively 
subjects which our grandfathers and grandmothers delighted to have 
set to Italian music. Plenty of good heavy choruses, tinkle-tankling 
instrumental music, plaintive ditties, with accompaniments on the fife 



THREE P.M. — THE PANTHEON BAZAAR. 



177 




178 TWICE ROUInD the ceock. 

and the fiddle, and lengthy screeds of droning recitatives, like the 
Latin accidence arranged for the bagpipes. Those were the days of 
the unhappy beings of whom Velluti and Ambrogetti were among the 
last whom a refined barbarity converted into soprani. The Italians 
have not many things to thank the first Napoleon for ; yet to his 
sway in Italy humanity owes the abolition of that atrocity. They dig 
up some of the worthy old pigtail operas now, and perform them on 
our modern lyric stage. A select audience of fogies, whose sympa- 
thies are all w T ith the past, comes to listen, and goes to sleep ; and 
" Iphigenia in Aulis," or " Ariadne in Naxos," is consigned to a 
Capuletian tomb of limbo. Days of good taste are these, my masters, 
when aristocratic ears are tickled by the melodious naughtinesses of 
the great Casino-and-Codliver-oil opera, the " Traviata ;" by the 
Coburg melodrama, mingled with Mrs. Ratcliffe's novel, and finished 
with extracts from Guicciardini's " Annals " — called the " Trovatore," 
[who was it fried that child, or broiled him, or ate him : Azucena, 
Leonora, the Conde di Luna, Mrs. Harris, all or any of them ?] or by 
the sparkling improbabilities of " Rigoletto," w r ith its charming 
Greenacre episode of the murdered lady in the sack. We manage 
those things so much better now-a-days. And the ballets, too ; do 
you know positively that in the pig-tail opera times, the lady dancers 
wore skirts of decent length ? do you know that Guimard danced in a 
hoop that reached nearly to her ankles, and that Noblet wore a cor- 
sage that ended just below her armpits, and a skirt that descended 
far below her knees ? Do you know, even, that Taglioni, and Ellsler, 
and Duvernay, the great terpsichorean marvels of. twenty years since, 
disdained the meretricious allurements of this refined and polished 
age, that calls garters " elastic bands," and w T inces at a grant of 
twenty pounds a year for providing living models for the students of 
the Dublin Academy ? — that strains at these gnats, and swallows the 
camel of a ballet at the opera ! Oh, stupid old pig-tail days, when 
we could take our wives and sisters to hear operas and see ballets, 
without burning with shame to think that we should take, or they 
suffer themselves to be taken, to witness a shameless exhibition, fit 
only for the blase patricians of the Lower Empire ! 

In the memoirs of old Nollekens, the sculptor, you will find that he 
was an assiduous frequenter of the Italian Opera at the Pantheon, to 
which he had a life admission — it did not last his life though, I am 
afraid — and that he sat in the pit with his sword by his side, and a 
worsted comforter round his neck. This must surely, however, have 



THREE P.M. THE PANTHEON BAZAAR. 179 

been before the days of Fripanelli's management. It is hard to say, 
indeed, for the Pantheon has been so many things by turns and nothing 
long. Once, if I mistake not, there was wont to be an exhibition of 
wax-work here ; once, too, it was famous as a place for masquerades 
of the most fashionable, or, at least, of the costliest description. Here 
Charles Fox and Lord Maldon, with dominoes thrown over their laced 
clothes, and masks pressed upon their powdered perukes, reeled in 
from the chocolate houses and the E. O. tables ; here, so the legends 
say, the bad young prince, who afterwards became a worse old king, 
the worthless and witless wearer of the Prince of Wales's three ostrich 
plumes — here George III.'s eldest born met the beautiful Perdita. He 
ill-treated her, of course, afterwards, as he ill-treated his wives (I say 
wives, in the plural number, do you understand?) and his mistresses, 
his father, his friends, and the people he was called upon to govern. 
He lied to, and betrayed, them all ; and he was Dei gratia, and died in 
the odour of civil list sanctity, and they have erected a statue to his 
disreputable memory in Trafalgar Square. 

Soft, whisper low, tread softly : the Pantheon was once a church ! 
Yes, there were pews in the area of the pit, and free-sittings in the 
galleries. There is a singing, buffooning place in Paradise Street, 
Liverpool, where they dance the Lancashire clog-hornpipe, yell comic 
songs on donkeys' backs, perform acrobatic feats, juggle, strum the 
banjo, clank the bones, belabour the tambourine, stand on their heads, 
and walk on the ceiling. This place is called the Colosseum, hut it 
was once a chapel. The pews, with very slight alteration, yet exist, 
and on the ledges where the hymn-books were wont to lie, stand now 
the bottles of Dublin stout and ginger-pop. I do not like these violent 
revolutions, these galvanic contrasts. They are hideous, they are un- 
natural, they are appalling. To return to the Pantheon— I still follow 
the legends — after it had been a masquerading temple and a wax- 
work show, and then a church, it was changed once more into a 
theatre ; but mark whatfolloived. One Saturday night the company 
were playing " Don Giovanni," and midnight had struck before the 
awful tramp of the Commendatore was heard re-echoing through the 
marble corridors of the libertine's palace, and the last tube of maccaroni 
stuck in Leporello's throat ; but when, the finale being at its approach, 
and to cap the climax of the catastrophe, twelve demons in flame- 
coloured garments, and bearing torches flaming with resin, rose from 
trap-doors to seize the guilty Don, the manager, who had been watching 
the scene from the wing, rushed on the stage with a screech of horror, 



180 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

crying out, " There ore thirteen! There are thirteen /" And so there 
were ! A solitary demon, with flaming eyes, a tail of incredible 
length, and bearing two torches, appeared, no man knew whence — he 
hadn't come up a trap to the foot-lights (the audience screaming and 
fainting by scores), danced a ghastly pas seul, cut six, and disappeared 
in a blaze of livid-coloured fire, which had not been provided in the 
usual iron pans by the property man.* Whether he took Don Giovanni 
or the manager away with him the legend does not state ; but it is 
certain that the latter went bankrupt a month afterwards, of course as 
a punishir °nt for his sins ; whereupon the lease of the Pantheon was 
purchased by a sober-minded speculator, who forthwith converted it 
into a bazaar, as which it has greatly thriven ever since. 

I am very fond of buying toys for children ; but I don't take them 
to the Pantheon for that purpose. I fear the price of the merchandise 
which the pretty and well-conducted female assistants at the stalls have 
to sell. I have been given to understand that incredible prices are 
charged for India-rubber balls, and that the quotations for drums, 
hares-and-tabors, and Noah's arks, are ruinously high. I have yet 
another reason for not patronising the Pantheon as a toy mart. It 
frequently happens that I feel slightly misanthropic and vicious in my 
toy-dealing excursions, and that my juvenile friends have sudden fits 
of naughtiness, and turn out to be anything but agreeable companions. 
Woe betide the ill-conditioned youngsters who cause me to assume 
the function of a vicarious " Bogey ! " But I serve them out, I promise 
you. To use a transpontine colloquialism, ungenteel but expressive, I 
" warm them." Not by blows or pinches — I disdain that ; not by 
taking them into shops where they sell unwholesome pastry or 
deleterious sweetstuff — I have no wish to impair their infantile powers 
of digestion ; though both processes, I have been given to understand, 
are sometimes resorted to by child- quellers ; but I " warm " them by 
taking them into toy shops and buying them ugly toys. Aha! my 
young friends ! who bought you the old gentleman impaled on the area 
railing while in the act of knocking at his own street door, and who 

* I am afraid that this legend must be regarded as what the " Times" news- 
paper called, in reference to old Peter Thellusson's delicate sense of honour, in pro- 
viding for a possible restitution cf property left in his charge by the ancient 
noblesse of Prance — a " modern myth." An analogous story, relative to the ap- 
pearance of a real demon on the stage, in addition to those forming part of the 
dramatis personm, is related in connection with Edward Alleyn, the actor ; and the 
supernatural visitation, it is said, caused him to quit the stage as a profession, and 
found Dulwich College. 



THREE P.M. — THE PANTHEON BAZAAR. 181 

emitted a dismal groan when the pedestal on which he stood was 
compressed ? Who purchased the monkey with the horrible visage, 
that ran up the stick ? who the dreadful crawling serpent, made of the 
sluggishly elastic substance — a compound of glue and treacle, I believe 
— of which printers' rollers are made, and that unwound himself in a 
shudderingly, reptile, life-like manner on the parlour carpet? Who 
brought you the cold, flabby toad, and the centipede at the end of the 
India-rubber string, with his heavy chalk body and quivering limbs, 
the great-grandfather of all the irreverent daddy-long-legs who 
wouldn't say their prayers, and were taken, in consequence, by those 
elongated appendages, and thrown, with more or less violence, down- 
stairs r This is about the best method I know for punishing a re- 
fractory child. There is another, an almost infallible and Rarey-like 
process of taming juvenile termagants in the absence of their parents ; 
but it entails a slight modicum of physical cruelty. Say that you 
are left alone with a child, too young to reason with, and who tootft 
behave himself. Don't slap him : it is brutal and cowardly on your 
part ; besides, it leaves marks, and you don't want to make an enemy 
of his mother. Don't make faces at him : it may spoil the beauty of 
your own countenance, and may frighten him out of his little wits. 
Shake him. Shake him till he becomes an animated whirligig. He 
isn't appalled; he is only bewildered. He doesn't know what on 
earth the unaccustomed motion means : then wink at him, and tell him 
that you will do it again if he doesn't behave himself; and it is per- 
fectly wonderful to see to what complete submission you can reduce 
him. It is true that a grown person must be a callous brute to try 
such measures with a defenceless infant ; but let that pass — we can't 
get on in the world without a little ruffianism. I have heard, even, 
that in the matrimonial state a good shaking will from time to time — - 
but soft ! 

The young ladies who serve behind the counters at the Pantheon, 
are much given to working the spiky cobweb collars in which our 
present belles delight, and which are worked in guipure, or crotchet, 
or application, or by some other process with an astounding name of 
which I am profoundly ignorant. To their lady customers they behave 
with great affability. The gentlemen, I am pleased, though mortified 
to say, they treat with condescension mingled with a reserved dignity 
that awes the boldest spirit. It is somewhat irritating, too, to know 
that they can be as merry as grigs among themselves when they so 
choose ; and it is a bending of the brows, a clinching of the fists, and 



182 TWICE EOUND THE CLOCK. 

a biting of the lips matter, to see them flitting from stall to stall, 
romping with one another in a pastoral manner, and retailing merry 
anecdotes, which may possibly be remarks on your personal appearance. 
Yet I have known a man with large whiskers (he went to the bad, and 
to Australia, and is now either high in the government or in the police 
over there) to whom a young lady assistant in the Pantheon, on a very 
wet day, once lent a silk umbrella. But he was always a bold man, 
and had a winning way with the sex. 

It is time, if you will excuse my mentioning it, that we should quit 
this labyrinth of avenues between triple-laden stalls, all crowded with 
ladies and children, whose voluminous jupons — the very babes and 
sucklings wear crinoline now — render locomotion inconvenient, not to 
say perilous. Pass the refreshment counter, where they sell the arrow- 
root cakes, w T hich I never saw anywhere else, and let us enter the con- 
servatory — a winter garden built long ere Crystal Palaces or Jardins 
d'Hiver w r ere dreamt of, and which to me is as pleasant a lounge as any 
that exists in London : a murmuring fountain, spangled w T ith gold and 
silver fish, and the usual number of ' ' winking bubbles beading at the 
brim ; " and good store of beautiful exotic plants and myriad-hued 
flowers. The place is but a niche, a narrow passage, with a glass roof 
and a circle at the end, where the fountain is, like the bulb of a ther- 
mometer ; but to me it is very delightful. It is good to see fair young 
faces, fair young forms, in rainbow, rustling garments, flitting in and 
about the plants and flowers, the fountain and the gold fish. It is good 
to reflect how much happiness and innocence there must be among 
these pretty creatures. The world for them is yet a place for flirting, 
and shopping, and dancing, and making themselves as fair to view as 
they and the looking-glass and the milliner can manage. The world is 
as yet a delightful Pantheon, full of flowers — real, wax, and artificial, 
and all pleasant — sandal- wood fans, petticoats w T ith worked edges, silk 
stockings, satin shoes, white kid gloves, varnished broughams, pet 
dogs, vanille ices, boxes at the opera, tickets for the Crystal Palace, 
tortoise-shell card-cases, enamelled visiting-cards, and scented pink 
invitation notes, with " On dansera " in the left-hand bottom corners, 
muslin slips, bandoline, perfumes, ballads and polkas with chromo- 
lithographed frontispieces, and the dear delightful new novels from 
Mudie's with uncut leaves, and mother-o'-pearl paper knives with coral 
spring handles to cut them withal. They have kind mammas and 
indulgent port- wine papas, w r ho bring them home such nice things from 
the city. They sit under such darling clergymen, with curls in the 



THREE P.M. THE PANTHEON BAZAAR. 183 

centre of their dear white foreheads; they have soft beds, succulent 
dinners, and softly-pacing hacks, on which to ride in coquettish-looking 
habits and cavalier hats. John the footman is always anxious to run 
errands for them ; and their additional male acquaintance is composed 
of charming creatures with white neckcloths, patent leather boots, 
irreproachable whiskers, and mellow tenor voices. Oh ! the delightful 
world ; sure, it is the meilleur des mondes possible, as Voltaire's Doctor 
Pangloss maintained. It is true that they were at school once, and 
suffered all the tyranny of the " calisthenic exercises " and the French 
mark, or were, at home, mewed up under the supervision of a stern 
governess, who set them excruciating tasks ; but, oh ! that was such a 
long time since, they were so young then — it was ever such a long 
time ago. You silly little creatures ! it was only the day before 

yesterday, and the day after to-morrow — . But u gather ye rose- 

buds while ye may," and regard not old Time as he is a-flying. For 
my part, I will mingle no drop of cynicism in the jewelled cup of your 
young enjoyment ; and I hope that the day after to-morrow, with un- 
kind husbands and ungrateful children, with physic-bottles and aches 
and pains, and debts and duns, may never come to you, and that your 
pretty shadows may never be less. 

You see that I am in an unusual state of mansuetude, and feel for 
the nonce inclined to say, " Bless everybody " — the Pope, the Pre- 
tender, the Pantheon, the pretty girls, and the sailors' pig-tails, 
though they 're now cut off. Every sufferer from moral podagra has 
such fits of benevolence between the twinges of his gout. But the 
fit, alas ! is evanescent ; and I have not been ten minutes in the con- 
servatory of the Pantheon before I begin to grumble again. I really 
must shut my ears in self-defence against the atrocious, the intolerable 
screeching of the parrots, the parroquettes, the cockatoos, and the 
macaws, who are permitted to hang on by their wicked claws and the 
skin of their malicious beaks to the perches round the fountain. The 
twittering of the smaller birds is irritating enough to the nervously 
afflicted ; but the parrots ! ugh ! that piercing, long-continued, hoarse 
shriek — it is like a signal of insane communication given by a patient 
at Hanwell to a brother lunatic at Colney Hatch. The worst of these 
abominable birds is, that they cannot or will not talk, and confine 
themselves to an inarticulate gabble. However, I suppose the fairest 
rose must have its thorns, and the milkiest white hind its patch of 
darker colour ; so it is incumbent on us, in all charity, to condone 
the ornithological nuisance which is the main drawback to a very 



184 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

pretty and cheerful place of resort. Only, I should like to know 
the people who buy the parrots, in order that I might avoid them. 

As we entered by Oxford Street, with its embeadled colonnade, it 
becomes our bounden duty to quit the building by means of that 
portal which I assumed to have been in days gone-by the stage-door 
of the pig-tail opera-house, and which gives egress into Great Marl- 
borough Street. I can't stand the parrots ; so, leaving my aunt (I 
wish she would lend me a hundred pounds), and my cousin (I wish 
she would lend me a kiss, and more sincerely do I wish that either of 
them existed in the flesh, or elsewhere but in my turbid imagination) ; 
leaving these shadowy relatives genteelly bargaining (they have 
already purchased a papier mache inkstand and a coral wafer-stamp), 
I slip through the conservatory's crystal precincts, inhale a farewell 
gust of flower-breeze, pass through a waiting-room, where some tired 
ladies are resting till their carriages draw up, and am genteelly bowed 
out by affable beadle No. 2. 

And now, whither away ? Shall I cross the road, and commence 
the first of a series of. six lessons in dancing from Miss Leonora 
Geary ? Shall I visit the harp and pianoforte establishment of Messrs. 
Erard, and try the tone of an " upright grand?" Shall I hie me to 
Marlborough Street police-court, and see how Mr. Bingham or Mr. 
Hard wick may be getting on ? No : I think I will take a walk down 
Regent Street (one cannot too frequently perambulate that delightful 
thoroughfare at the height of the season), turn off by Vigo Lane, and 
take a stroll — a five minutes' stroll, mind, for I have an appointment 
close to St. George's Hospital, and Mr. Decimus Burton's triumphal 
arch, as soon after four as possible — clown the Burlington Arcade. 

I remember once refecting myself at a public dinner — the Tenth 
Anniversary Festival of the Hospital for Elephantiasis, I think it was 
— when my next neighbour to the right (to the left was a rural dean) 
was a gentleman in a white waistcoat that loomed large like the lateen 
sail of a Palermian felucca, and whose convivial countenance was of 
the exact hue and texture of the inside of an over-ripe fig. He took 
remarkably good care of himself during dinner time, had twice spring 
soup, and twice salmon and cucumber, led the waiters a terrible life, 
and gathered quite a little grove of bottles of choice wine round him. 
I am bound to say that he was not selfish or solitary in his enjoyment^ 
for he pressed a peculiar Sautern upon me, and an especial Chateau 
Lafitte (the landlord must have known and respected him), with a 
silver label hanging to its bottle neck, like the badge of a Hansom 



THREE P.M. — THE PANTHE01ST BAZAAR. 185 

cabman. He also recommended gosling to me, as being the very 
thing to take after lamb, in a rich husky voice, that did one good to 
hear. At the conclusion of the repast, after we had dabbled with 
the rose water in the silver-gilt shield, which it is the custom to 
send round, and which nobody knows exactly what to do with — I 
always feel inclined to upset it, for the purpose of eliciting an 
expression of public feeling, and clearing the atmosphere generally ; 
and when the business of the evening, as the absurd system of indis- 
criminate toast-giving is termed, had commenced, and the professional 
ladies and gentlemen were singing something about the " brave and 
bearded barley" in execrable time and tune, of course in the most pre- 
posterously irrelevant connection with the health just drank — either 
the Army and Navy, or the two Houses of Parliament — my neighbour 
with the ripe fig countenance turned to me, and wiping his moist lips 
with his serviette, whispered these remarkable words : " Sir, a public 
dinner is the sublimation of an assemblage of superfluities.' ' He said 
no more during the evening, filled up his name, however, for a hand- 
some amount in the subscription-list (his name was announced amid 
thunders of applause by the secretary, but I really forget whether he 
was a general or a wholesale grocer), and went away in anything but 
a superfluous state of sobriety. But his words sank deep into my 
mind, and they bring me at once to the Burlington Arcade. 

Which is to me another sublimate of superfluities : a booth trans- 
planted bodily from Vanity Fair. I don't think there is a shop in its 
enceinte where they sell anything that we could not do without. 
Boots and shoes are sold there, to be sure, but what boots and shoes ? 
varnished and embroidered and be-ribboned figments, fitter for a fancy 
ball or a lady's chamber, there to caper to the jingling melody of a 
lute, than for serious pedestrianism. Paintings and lithographs for 
gilded boudoirs, collars for puppy dogs, and silver-mounted whips for 
spaniels, pocket handkerchiefs, in which an islet of cambric is 
surrounded by an ocean of lace, embroidered garters and braces, 
fillagree flounces, firework-looking bonnets, scent bottles, sword- 
knots, brocaded sashes, worked dressing-gowns, inlaid snuff-boxes, 
and falbalas of all descriptions ; these form the stock-in-trade of the 
merchants who have here their tiny boutiques. There are hair- 
dressers' shops too ; but I will be bound that their proprietors would 
not be content with trimming a too luxuriant head of hair. They 
would insist upon curling, oiling, scenting, and generally tittivating 
you. They would want you to buy amandine for your hands, kalydor 

N 



186 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

for your hair, dentifrice, odonto, vinaigre cle toilette, hair-brushes 
with ivory backs, and tortoiseshell pocket-combs with mirrors ap- 
pended to them. They would insist that you could not live without 
pommade Hongroise and fixatures for the moustaches, or Frangipani 
for the pocket-handkerchief. I have very few ambitions, but one 
is to become the proprietor of a house in the Burlington Arcade, and 
forthwith to open a chandler's shop in the very midst of its vanities 
and its whim-whams. The reproof, I trust, would be as stern, though 
I am afraid it would have as little effect, as that of the uncompro- 
mising patriots of the reign of terror, who planted the parterres of 
the Tuileries gardens with potatoes. To the end of time, I perpend, 
we shall have this hankering after superfluities, and little princesses 
will ask their governesses why the people need starve for want of 
bread, when there are such nice Bath buns in the confectioners' shop 
windows. 

But the clock of St. James's warns me that I am due at Hyde 
Park Corner, and passing by yet another beadle, I emerge into 
Piccadilly. 



FOUR P.M.— TATTERSALL'S, AND THE PARK. 

Was there not a time when Hyde Park Corner was the Ultima Thule 
of London, and Kensington was in the country ? — when Hammersmith 
was far away — a district known only to washerwomen and nursery 
gardeners— and Turnham Green and Kew were places where citizens 
took their wives to enjoy the perfection of ruralisation ? Was it not 
to the Hercules' Pillars at Hyde Park Corner that Squire Western 
sent his chaplain to recover the snuff-box, which the worthy landed- 
gentleman and justice of the peace had left there when he halted to 
bait? Was not Hyde Park Corner a rendezvous for highwaymen, 
where they listened with eagerness for " the sound of coaches ;" and 
parted, some towards Fulham, some towards Hounslow, some towards 
the Uxbridge road, where they might meet full-pouched travellers, 
and bid them " stand and deliver?" I remember, myself, old Pad- 
lock House at Knightsbride, standing in the midst of the roadway, 
like Middle Row in Holborn, or the southern block of Holywell Street 



TATTERSALL S A^D THE PARK. 187 

in the Strand, with the padlock itself fixed in the grimy wall, which, 
according to the legendary wishes of a mythical testator, was never to 
be pulled down till the lock rotted away from its chain, and the chain 
from the brick and mortar in which it was imbedded. The cavalry 
barracks at Knightsbride seemed to have been built in the year One, 
and we boys whispered that the little iron knobs on the wall of the 
line of stables, which are, it is to be presumed, intended for purposes 
of ventilation (though I am not at all certain about the matter yet) 
were miniature portholes, at which fierce troopers, with carbines 
loaded to the muzzle, and ready pointed, kept guard every day, in 
order to repel the attacks of the "Radicals." Alack-a-day ! but the 
"Radicals" seem to be getting somewhat the better of it at this 
present time of writing. Kensington High Street seemed to belong 
to a hamlet of immense age ; the old church was a very cathedral — 
built, of course, by William of Wykeham ; and as for Holland House, 
there could not be any doubt about that. It came in naturally with 
the Conqueror, and the first Lord Holland. 

Hyde Park Corner before the battle of Waterloo must have been a 
strange, old-fashioned-looking place. No Apsley House : the site was 
occupied by the old woman who kept the apple- stall, or the bun- 
house, or the curds and whey shop, and who wouldn't be bought out, 
save at enormous prices, by his late Grace, Field-Marshal Arthur 
Duke of Wellington. No triumphal arch; and, thank good taste, no 
equestrian statue of the late F. M. Arthur Dux, &c, on the summit 
thereof. No entablatured colonnade, with nothing to support, towards 
the Park. No Achilles statue. A mean, unpicturesque, common- 
place spot, I take it. What could you expect of an epoch in which 
the Life Guards wore cocked hats and pig-tails, the police-officers 
red waistcoats and top boots, when the king dejure was mad, and the 
king cle facto wore a wig and padded himself? A bad time. We 
have a lady on the throne now who behaves as a sovereign should 
behave, and London grows handsomer every day. 

I declare that it does ; and I don't care a fig for the cynics — most 
of them ignorant cynics, too — who, because they have accomplished a 
cheap tour to Paris, or have gone half-way up the Rhine, think them- 
selves qualified to under-rate and to decry the finest metropolis in the 
world. I grant the smoke — in the city — and I confess that the 
Thames is anything but oderiferous in sultry weather, and is neither 
so blue nor so clear as the Neva; but I say that London has dozens 
and scores of splendid streets and mansions, such as I defy Paris, 



188 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

Vienna, Berlin, or St. Petersburg — I know their architectural glories 
by heart — to produce. I say that Pall Mall beats the Grand Canal 
at Venice ; that Eegent Street, with a little more altitude in its build- 
ings, would put the Boulevard des Italiens to shame ; and that Can- 
non Street makes the Nevskoi Perspective hide its diminished head. 
Some of these days, when I can get that balance at the banker's I 
have been waiting for so long, I shall sit down and indite a book 
entitled, "A Defence of London, Architecturally t Considered," the 
which I shall publish at my own expense, as I am certain no pub- 
lisher would purchase the copyright. 

Take Hyde Park Corner. Between the Brandenburg Thor at 
Berlin and the Puerta del Sol at Madrid, you will not find a gayer, 
more picturesque, more sparkling scene. Ugly and preposterous as 
is the man in the cocked hat, who holds the rolling-pin and is wrapped 
in the counterpane, on the top of the arch, we are not for ever giving 
ourselves wry necks in the attempt to look up at him ; and the arch 
itself is noble and grandiose. Then, opposite, through the a giorno of 
Mr. " Anastasius" Hope's colonnade, that supports nothing, you catch, 
a glimpse of the leafy glories of Hyde Park — carriages, horses, horse- 
women, Achilles' statue, and all. And again, to the right of the. arch, 
is St. George's Hospital, looking more like a gentleman's mansion 
than an abode of pain ; and to the left the ever-beautiful, ever-fresh, 
and ever-charming Green Park. And then far away east stretches 
the hill of Piccadilly, a dry Bialto (only watch it at night, and see the 
magical effects of its double line of gas-lamps) ; and westward the 
new city that the Londoners have built after their city was finished, 
beyond the Ultima Thule. Magnificent lines of stately mansions, 
towering park gates, bring us to the two gigantic many-storeyed 
edifices at Albert Gate, which were for a long time christened " Gib- 
raltar," because they were supposed to be impregnable, no tenant 
having been found rich or bold enough to "take them." Taken they 
both were at last, however. The further one, or at least its lower 
portion, has been for a considerable period occupied by a banking 
company ; while the near one — ah ! that near Gibraltar, has had two 
strange tenants — the representatives of two strange fortunes. There 
dwelt the Railway King, a gross, common, mean man, who could not 
spell very well, Humour said : but to him — being king of iron roads 
and stuffed with shares even to repletion, such shares being gold in 
those days, not dross — came the nobles of the land, humbling them- 
selves on their gartered knees, and pressing the earth with their coro- 



TATTERSALL S AND THE PARK. 189 

neted brows, and calling him King of Men, that he might give them 
shares, which he gave them. So this gross man was "hail fellow 
well met" with the nobles, and was drunk at their feasts and they at 
his, and he sat in the Parliament House, and made law r s for us ; and 
when he sent out cards of invitation, the wives and daughters of the 
nobles rose gladly in the night season, and having painted their faces 
and bared their necks, and put tresses of dead men's hair on their 
heads, they drove in swift chariots to Albert Gate, and all went merry 
as a marriage bell. 

" But, hush. ! hark ! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!" 

It was indeed the great knell of universal railway smashdom, the St. 
Sepulchre's boom of found-out humbug. So dowm went the Railway 
King, and down into the kennel toppled the iron crown — not so much 
of Lombardy, this time, as of those Lombards whose arms are three 
golden spheres. An iron crown to moralise over, that ; and of which, 
as of a red-hot halfpenny, the motto reads appositely — " Guai a chi 
la tocca" " Woe be to him w T ho touches it." 

Albert Gate, the near house, yet saw lighted rooms, and great 
revelry and feasting, and a brave tenant ; no other than Master Fialin 
Persigny, Ambassador of France. Courtly, witty, ruse Persigny 
Fialin ! the nobles and princes were as glad to come to his merry- 
makings as in the old time, w T hen the now broken-down Railway Stag 
held high court there. Crafty Fialin ! he must have rubbed his 
hands sometimes, with a sly chuckle, as, from the upper chambers of 
his splendid house, he tried to descry, far off at Kensington, a now 
w r aste spot where once stood Gore House. And, oh ! he must have 
sung — " "What a very fine thing it is to be Ambassador-in-law T to a 
very magnificent three-tailed Bashaw of an Emperor, and to live at 
Albert Gate." Not so many years since, though, master and man 
were glad to take tea at Gore House, with the beautiful Woman who 
w r rote books, and the handsome Count who painted portraits ; when 
the Bashaw's bills were somewhat a drug in the discount market, and 
his ambassador did not precisely know how to make both ends meet. 
All of w T hich proves that the world is full of changes, and that fortune 
is capricious, and that master and man have made an uncommonly 
good thing of it. 

Don't be afraid of a sudden raid on my part towards the lands that 
lie beyond Brentford. My present business lies close to Hyde Park 
Corner, close to St. George's Hospital. We have but to turn down 



190 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Lower Grosvenor Place, and lo and behold, we are at our destination 
— Tattersall's. 

I suppose the British Empire could not progress prosperously 
without Tattersall's ; so, I suppose, we must cry Tattersall's and the 
Constitution ! Tattersall's and our Ancient Institutions ! Tattersall's 
and Liberty ! And, indeed, of the last there seems in reality to be 
much liberty, and equality, and fraternity in all connected with horse- 
racing ; and at Tattersall's, though the resort of the most patrician 
turfites, the democratic element is appreciably strong. So long as 
both parties pay their bets, dukes and dustmen, Jews and jockeys, 
seem to meet upon a cheerful footing of 4fi man to man" at this 
peculiarly national establishment. 

The astute prophets who vaticinate in the Sunday newspapers, 
and who never can, by the remotest chance of possibility, be wrong 
in their calculations, are in the habit of speaking of the sporting 
transactions at Tattersall's as u Doings at the Corner." I think it 
would be slightly more appropriate if they were to characterise them 
as " Doings at the Corners," for of corners, and a multiplicity of 
them, Tattersall's seems made up. It is easy enough to distinguish 
the whereabouts of the great temple of horse-racing, for from Hyde 
Park Corner far down Grosvenor Place, you will find at four 
o'clock (business has been going on throughout the afternoon), a 
serried line of vehicles, with the horses' heads towards Pimlico. 
Equipages there are here of every description and grade. Lordly 
mail phaetons, the mettlesome steeds impatiently champing at the 
bit, and shaking their varnished, silver-mounted, crest-decorated 
harness ; slim, trim, dainty gentlemen's cabriolets (I am sorry to 
see that those most elegant of private vehicles are becoming, year 
after year, fewer in number), with high wheels and tall gray horses, 
and diminutive, topbooted tigers, squaring their little arms over the 
aprons ; open carriages and pairs, with parasolled ladies within (for 
even rank and beauty do not disdain to wait at Tattersall's while my 
Lord or Sir John goes inside to bet, and perhaps also to put some- 
thing on the favourite for Lady Clementina or the Honourable Agnes) ; 
gigs and dog-carts, sly little broughams with rose-coloured blinds and 
terriers peeping from beneath them, and whose demure horses look 
as though they could tell a good many queer stories if they chose ; 
taxed carts, chaise carts, and plain carts, that are carts and nothing 
else. I should not be at all surprised indeed to see, some fine after- 
noon, a costermonger's " shallow," donkey, greenstuff-baskets and 



TATTERS ALL S AND THE PAKE. 191 

all, drawn up before TattersaLTs, while its red 'kerchiefed, corduroyed, 
and ankle-jacked proprietor stepped down the yard to inquire after 
the state of the odds. There is, you may be sure, a plentiful sprink- 
ling of Hansom cabs among the wheeled things drawn up. The 
Piccadilly cabmen are exceedingly partial to fares whose destination 
is Tattersall's. Such fares are always pressed for time, and always 
liberal ; and they say that there are few Jehus on the stand between 
the White Horse Cellar and Hyde Park Corner who do not stand to 
win or lose large sums by every important racing event. 

When you arrive at a building called St. George's School of 
Medicine, and at the door of which, at most times of the day, you 
will find lounging a knot of medical students, who should properly, I 
take it, in this sporting locality, have a racing and u down-the-road" 
look, but who, on the contrary, have the garb and demeanour of 
ordinary gentlemen — (What has become of the old medical student 
whom Mr. Albert Smith used to caricature for our amusement, with 
his shaggy overcoat, white hat, lank hair, short thick stick, staring 
shawl, short pipe, and slangy manners and conversation? Is he 
extinct as a type, or did he never exist, save in the lively imagination 
of that popular writer, and whom I hope all good luck will attend r) 
— When you have passed this edifice, sacred to Galen, Celsus, 
Hippocrates, and the rest of the Faculty of Antiquity, it will be 
time for you to turn down a narrow lane, very like one leading to an 
ordinary livery- stable, and to find yourself suddenly in a conglomera- 
tion of " corners." At one corner stands a building with a varnished 
oak door, that does not ill resemble a dissenting chapel with a genteel 
congregation, and fronting this, screened from the profanum vulgus 
by a stout railing, sweeps round a gravelled walk, surrounding a 
shaven grass-plat of circular form. This is the famous " Ping," of 
which you have heard so much ; and the building that resembles a 
dissenting chapel is none other than Messrs. Tattersall's subscription 
rooms. Within those to ordinary mortals unapproachable precincts, 
the privacy of which is kept with as much severity as the interior of 
the Stock Exchange, the great guns of the turf discharge their broad- 
sides of bets. They do not always confine themselves to the interior, 
however ; but, when the weather is fine and betting hot, particularly 
on settling days, when there is an immense hubbub and excitement 
possessing every one connected with the turf, from the smallest stable- 
boy up to Lords Derby and Zetland, they come forth into the open, 
and bet round the grass plat. Now cast your eyes to the right (you 



192 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

are standing with your back to Grosvenor Place), and you will see a 
low archway, passing through which a hand points to you the spot 
where Mr. Rarey, the horse-tamer, had his office ; while on the other 
side is a counting-house, somewhat dark and mysterious in aspect, 
w T here the names and prices of more racers and hunters than you or I 
ever heard of are entered in Tattersall's bulky ledgers. Beyond the 
archway stretches a spacious court-yard, the centre occupied by a 
species of temple, circular in form, with painted wooden pillars and a 
cupola, surmounted by a bust of George IV. Beneath the cupola is 
the figure of a fox sedent and regardant, something like the dog of 
Alcibiades, and looking, in troth, very cunning and foxy indeed. To 
the right, looking from the archway, are stables, with a covered pent- 
house in front ; to the left, another archway, with more stables and 
coach-houses. 

Tattersall's is a curious sight at all times, and has something per- 
vading it quite sui generis. Even when the ring is deserted by the 
gentleman turfites, and when no sales by auction of race-horses, 
hunters, carriage-horses, carriages, or fox-hounds, are proceeding in 
the court-yard (the auctioneer's rostrum is close to the king-crowned, 
fox-decorated temple), there is ample food for observation and amuse- 
ment in the contemplation of the extraordinary array of hangers-on, 
who, at all times and seasons, summer and winter, are to be found 
about the purlieus of the Corner. I do not so much speak of the 
mere grooms, stable-boys, coachmen, and helpers, who have horses to 
mind or carriages to look after. You may find their prototypes down 
every mews, and in every livery-stable. The originals to whom I 
allude are to be seen only here, and on race-courses, hanging about 
the grand-stand and the weighing-house. They are entirely different 
to the nonchalant individuals who, in short coats, and a straw in their 
mouths, haunt the avenues of Aldridge's Repository, in St. Martin's 
Lane. They would appertain, seemingly, to a superior class; but 
from top to toe — laterally, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally — 
they are unmistakeably horse-flesh loving, and by horse-flesh living, 
men. It is not but you will find white neckcloths and black broad- 
cloth in their attire, but there is a cut to the coat, a tie to the neck- 
cloth, that prevents the possibility of error as to their vocation. They 
are sporting men all over. Hard-featured, serious-looking, spare- 
limbed men mostly, much given to burying their hands in their coat- 
pockets (never in their trousers), and peaceably addicted to the wear- 
ing of broad-brimmed hats. Now, the general acceptation of a 



TATTERSALLS S AND THE PARK. 



193 




194 TWICE ROU.ND THE CLOCK. 

"sporting" man would give him a tall, shiny hat, with a narrow 
brim, and considerably cocked on one side ; yet I do verily believe 
that, were these men attired in buttonless drab, brown beavers, 
striped worsted hose, and buckles, that they would preserve the same 
sporting identity. They are the wet Quakers of the turf. What the 
exact nature of their multifarious functions about horses may be, I 
am not rightly informed. I conjecture them to be trainers, country 
horse-dealers, licensed victuallers with a turn for sporting, gentlemen 
farmers who " breed a colt" occasionally, or, maybe, perfectly private 
individuals led by an irresistible penchant to devote themselves to the 
study and observation of horses, and led by an uncontrollable destiny 
to hang, their lives-long through, about the Corner. Hangers-on of 
a lower grade there are in plenty. Striped-sleeved waistcoats, 
corduroy or drab cloth smalls and leggings ; nay, even the mighty 
plush galligaskins of coachmanhood, top boots, fur and moleskin caps, 
sticks with crutches and a thong at the end, to serve, if needful, as 
whips ; horseshoe scarf pins, and cord trousers made tight at the 
knees, and ending in laced-up boots. These — the ordinary parapher- 
nalia of racing attire— are to be met with at every step ; while the 
bottommost round of the sporting ladder is to be found in a forlorn 
creature in a stained ragged jerkin, that once w r as scarlet, matted hair, 
and naked feet. He hangs about the entrance, calls everybody 
" captain," and solicits halfpence with a piteous whine. I suppose 
he is a chartered beggar, licensed to pursue his harmless mendicancy 
here. Perhaps he may have kept hounds and harriers, carriages and 
horses— may have spent ten thousand a year, gone to the dogs, and 
turned up again at Tattersail's. Who knows ? You had better give 
him the benefit of the doubt, and, commiserating his ragged-robin 
appearance, bestow sixpence on him. 

Now let us take a peep at the magnates who are jotting down 
the current state of the odds in betting-books. Look at them well, 
and wonder. Why, all the world's a ring, and all the men and 
women in it merely betters. To come more nearly towards exactitude, 
it seems as though a good portion of at least the male part of the 
community had sent representatives to Tattersail's, while the genuine 
sporting element does not seem by any means so strong as you might 
reasonably expect. The genus " swell," with his longsurtout, double- 
breasted waistcoat, accurately-folded scarf, peg-top trousers, eye- 
glass, umbrella, and drooping moustache, is perhaps predominant. 
And our friend the " swell" is indeed a " welcome guest," in the 



TATTERSALL S AND THE PARK. 195 

" ring/' for he lias, in the majority of instances, plenty of money, is 
rather inclined to bet foolishly — not to say with consummate imbe- 
cility — so long as his money lasts he pays with alacrity, and it takes 
a long time to drain him dry even at betting, which is a forcing 
engine that would empty another Lake of Haarlem of its contents in 
far less time than was employed to drain the first. 

Your anxious sporting man, with lines like mathematical problems 
in his shrewd face, is not of course wanting in the assemblage. Here, 
too, you shall see the City dandy, shining with new clothes and 
jewellery, who has just driven down from the Stock Exchange to see 
what is going on at " Tat's," and who is a member of the " Ring" as 
well as of the " House." But those, perhaps, who seem the most 
ardent in their pursuit of the fickle goddess, as bearing on the Don- 
caster St. Leger, are certain florid elderly gentlemen, in bright blue 
body coats, with brass buttons and resplendent shirt-frills, and hats of 
the antique elegant or orthodox Beau Brummel form and cock. 

Such is the outward aspect of the Ring. Into its penetralia, into 
the mysteries of its combinations, I, rash neophyte, do not presume 
to inquire. They are too awful for me. I am iguorant of them, nor, 
if I knew, should I dare to tell them. I should expect the curtain of 
the temple to fall down and oyer whelm me, as befell the rash stranger 
who ventured to watch from, as he thought, a secure point of espial, 
the celebration of the mysteries of Isis at Thebes. Besides, I never 
could make either head or tail of a betting-book. Poeta nascitur non 
fit, say the Latins. On devient cuisinier mais on nait rotisseur — u One 
may become a cook, but one is born a roaster," say the French ; and 
I verily believe that the betting-man is to the manner born, and that 
if he does not feel an innate vocation for the odds, he had much better 
jump into a cauldron of boiling pitch than touch a betting-book — 
which theory I offer with confident generosity for the benefit of those 
young gentlemen who think it a proper thing and a fast thing to make 
up a book for the Derby or the Oaks, whether they understand any- 
thing about the matter or not. 

To all appearances, the Ring and the Subscription-room, with the 
adjacent avenues for the outsiders (you should see the place on the 
Sunday afternoon before the Derby) are quite sufficient to take up all 
the accommodation which the ''Corner" can afford; but there are 
many other things done within Messrs. Tattersall's somewhat crowded 
premises. There is the auctioneering business ; the sales, when whole 
studs are brought to the hammer, and thousands of pounds' worth of 



196 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

horseflesh are disposed of in the course of a few minutes. There are 
the days for the sale of all manner of genteel wheeled vehicles, which 
have been inspected on the previous day by a committee de haut gout, 
of which ladies belonging to the elite of fashion are not unfrequently 
members. For the cream of nobility is, oft-times, not too proud to 
ride in second-hand carriages. 

One more episode of "Corner" life, and I must quit the queer, 
motley scene. Down below the Subscription-room is another corner 
occupied by an old-fashioned hostelry, called the " Turf Tap," and 
here the commonalty of Tattersall's frequenters are to be found at any 
hour of the day, occupied with the process of sustentation by liquid 
refreshment. And yet, though the place is almost entirely "used" 
by sporting men, it has very little the appearance of a "sporting" 
public-house. No portraits of ki coaching incidents," or famous prize- 
fighters, decorate its walls ; no glass-cases containing the stuffed 
anatomies of dogs of preternaturally small size, and that have killed 
unheard-of numbers of rats in a minimum of minutes, ornament its 
bar-parlour ; no loudly-boisterous talk about the last fight, or the next 
race coming off, echoes through its bar ; and the landlord hasn't a 
broken nose. The behaviour of the company is grave and decorous, 
almost melancholy ; and on the bench outside, wary-looking stable- 
men, and sober grooms, converse in discreet undertone on "parties" 
and " events," not by them, or by any means, to be communicated 
to the general public. Tattersall's is a business-like place altogether, 
and even its conviviality is serious and methodical. 

I think I should like to ride a horse and take a turn in Rotten 
Row, if I only knew how to accomplish the equestrian feat ; but I am 
realty afraid to adventure it. There are some people who do things 
capitally which they have never been taught ; and who ride and drive, 
as it were, by intuition. Irishmen are remarkable for this faculty, 
and I do not regard as by any means a specimen of boastfulness, the 
reply of the young Milesian gentlemen to the person who asked him 
if he could play the fiddle, that he did not know, but that he dared 
say he could, if he tried. But I am afraid that the mounting of the 
easiest-going park hack would be too much for your obedient servant, 
and that the only way of insuring security, would be to get inside the 
animal and pull the blinds down ; or, that being zoologically impos- 
sible, to have my coat skirts nailed to the saddle ; or to be tied to the 
body of my gallant steed with cords, in the manner practised in the 
remotest antiquity by the young men of Scythia on their first intro- 



TATTERS ALL S AND THE PARK. 



197 




4 ?\^ 



198 TWICE KOUO THE CLOCK. 

duction to a live horse, and their commencement of the study of equita- 
tion. I passed three days once at the hospitable mansion of a friend 
in Staffordshire, who, the morning after my arrival, wanted me to do 
something he called " riding to hounds." I said, " Well out of it," 
respectfully declined the invitation, and retired to the library, where 
I read Roger de Wendover's " Flowers of History" till dinner time. 
I daresay the ladies, who all rode like Amazons, thought me a milk- 
sop ; but I went to bed that night without any broken bones. I 
have an acquaintance, too, a fashionable riding-master at Brighton, 
a tremendous creature, who wears jack-boots, and has a pair of 
whiskers like the phlanges of a screw-propeller. He has been 
obliging enough to say that he will " mount " me any time I come 
his way, but I would as soon mount the topmost peak of Chim- 
borazo. 

I beg to state that this short essay on horsemanship is apropos of 
Hyde Park and notably of Rotten Row, into which I wander after 
quitting Tattersall's, and where, leaning over the wooden rails, I con- 
template the horsemen and horsewomen caracoling along the spongy 
road with admiration, not unmixed with a little envy. What a much 
better, honester world it would be if people would confess a little more 
frequently to that feeling of envy ? For Envy is not always, believe 
me, grovelling in a cavern, red-eyed and pale-faced, and gnawing a 
steak sliced off her own liver. Envy can be at times noble, generous, 
heroic. If I see a gay, gallant, happy, ingenious boy of eighteen, and 
for a moment envy him his youth, his health, his strength, his in- 
nocence, the golden prospect of a sunshiny futurity, that stretches out 
before him, does it follow that I wish to deprive him of one of those 
gifts, or that I bear him malice for possessing them ? I declare it does 
not follow. I say to him — /, curve ! " Good luck have thou, with 
thine honour — ride on ; " and as I go home to my garret^ if I envy the 
bird as he sings, need I shoot him ? or the dog as he lies winking and 
basking in the sun, need I kick him ? or the golden beetle trudging 
along the gravel, need I trample on him ? But people cry fie upon the 
envy that is harmless, and must needs assume a virtue if they have it 
not ; and. concerning that latter quality my private belief is, that if 
Virtue were to die, Hypocrisy would have to go into the deepest 
mourning immediately. 

I am glad to say that I am not by any means alone as I lean over 
the rails. Whether it is that they can't or won't ride, I know not ; but 
I find myself surrounded by groups of exquisites, who, to judge by 



TA.TTERSALL S AXD THE PAEK. 199 

their outward appearance, must be the greatest dandies in London. 
For once in a day, I see gentlemen dressed in the exact similitude of 
the ' emblazoned cartoons in the "Monthly Magazine of Fashion/' 
I had always, previously, understood those pictorial prodigies to be 
gross caricatures of, and libels on, at least the male portion of the 
fashionable world. But I find that I am mistaken. Such peg-top 
trousers ! such astounding waistcoat patterns ! such lofty heels to the 
varnished boots ! such Brobdignagian moustaches and whiskers ! such 
ponderous watch-chains, bearing masses of coins and trinkets ! such 
bewildering varieties of starched, choking all-round collars ! such 
breezy neckties and alarming scarves ! Ladies, too — real ladies — 
promenade in an amplitude of crinoline difficult to imagine and im- 
possible to describe ; some of them with stalwart footmen following 
them, whose looks beam forth conscious pride at the superlative 
toilettes of their distinguished proprietresses ; some escorted by their 
bedizened beaux. Little foot-pages ; swells walking three, sometimes 
four, abreast ; gambolling children ; severe duennas ; wicked old bucks, 
splendidly attired, leering furtively under the bonnets — what a scene 
of more than " Arabian Nights " delight and gaiety ! And the green 
trees wave around, around, around ; and the birds are on the boughs ; 
and the blessed sun is in the heavens, and rains gold upon the 
beauteous Danaes, w T ho prance and amble, canter and career, on their 
graceful steeds throughout the length of Rotten Row. 

The Danaes ! the Amazons ! the lady cavaliers ! the horsewomen ! 
can any scene in the world equal Rotten Row at four in the afternoon, 
and in the full tide of the season ? Bois do Boulogne, Course at Cal- 
cutta, Cascine at Florence, Prado at Madrid, Atmeidan at Constanti- 
nople- — I defy ye all. Rotten Row is a very Peri's garden for beautiful 
women on horseback. The Cliff at Brighton offers, to be sure, just as 
entrancing a sight towards the end of December; but what is Brighton, 
after all, but London-super-Marer The sage Titmarsh has so christened 
it ; and the beauties of Rotten Row are transplanted annually to the 
vicinity of the Chain Pier and Brill's baths. Watch the sylphides as 
they fly or float past in their ravishing riding-habits and intoxicatingly 
delightful hats : some with the orthodox cylindrical beaver, with the 
flowing veil ; others with roguish little wide-awakes, or pertly cocked 
cavaliers' hats and green plumes. And as the joyous cavalcade streams 
past, (I count the male riders absolutely for nothing, and do not deem 
them worthy of mention, though there may be marquises among them) 
from time to time the naughty wind will flutter the skirt of a habit. 



200 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

and display a tiny, coquettish, brilliant little boot, with a military heel, 
and tightly strapped over it the Amazonian riding trouser. 

Only, from time to time, while you gaze upon these fair young 
daughters of the aristocracy disporting themselves on their fleet 
coursers, you may chance to have with you a grim town Diogenes, who 
has left his tub for an airing in the park ; and who, pointing with the 
finger of a hard buckskin glove towards the graceful ecuyeres, will say : 
" Those are not all countesses' or earls' daughters, my son. She on 
the bay, yonder, is Lais. Yonder goes Aspasia, with Jack Alcibiades 
on his black mare Timon : see, they have stopped at the end of the 
ride to talk to Phryne in her brougham. Some of those dashing 
delightful creatures have covered themselves with shame, and their 
mothers with grief, and have brought their fathers' gray hair with 
sorrow to the grave. All is not gold that glitters, my son." 



FIVE O'CLOCK P.M.— THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND 
THE PRISONERS' VAN. 

The English are the only " Clubable" people on the face of the 
earth. Considering the vast number of clubs which are more or less 
understood to flourish all over the Continent, and in the other hemi- 
sphere, it is within possibility that I shall be accused of having uttered 
something like a paradox ; but I adhere to my dictum, and will 
approve it Truth. Not but that, concerning paradoxes themselves, I 
maybe of the opinion| of Don Basilio in the "Barber of Seville," 
expressed with regard to calumny. " Calumniate, calumniate," says 
that learned casuist ; " calumniate, and still calumniate, something will 
always come of it." So, in a long course of paradoxes, it is hard but 
that you shall find a refreshing admixture of veracity. 

Do you think you can call the French a "clubable" nation, 
because in their revolutions of '89 and '48 they burst into a mushroom 
crop of clubs ? Do you think that the gentleman whom a late com- 
plication of political events brought into connection with a committee 
of Taste, consisting of twelve honest men assembled in a jury-box, 



THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS VAN. 201 

and whom, the penny-a-liners were kind enough to inform us, was in 
his own country known as " Bernard le Clubbiste," could be by any 
means considered as what w r e called a " club-man r" Could he be 
compared with Jawkins or Borekins, Sir Thomas de Boots, Major 
Pendennis, or any of the Pall Mall and St. James's Street bow- 
window ]oungers, whom the great master of club life has so inimitably 
delineated ? No more than we could parallelise the dingy, garlic- 
reeking, revolutionary dub-room on a three-pair back at the bottom 
of a Paris court-yard, with its " tribune," and its quarrelsome patriots, 
to the palatial Polyanthus, the Podasokus or the Poluphlosboion. 
French clubs ever have been — and will be again, I suppose, when the 
next political smash affords an opportunity for the re-establishment 
of such institutions — mere screeching, yelling, vapouring " pig-and- 
whistle" symposia; full of rodomontading stump orators, splitting 
the silly groundlings' ears with denunciations of the infamous 
oppressors of society — the society that wears pantaloons without 
patches, and has one-and-ninepence in its pockets ; yelping for com- 
munism, equal division of property, and toothpicks, solidarity, nation- 
alities, and similar moonshine-and-water ices ; " demanding heads,"' 
with fierce imprecations about universal fraternity, till their own 
troublesome bodies — for society's mere peace and quietness' sake — 
are securely shackled and straight-waiscoated up, and carted aw r ay in 
police-vans to deep-holded ships, whence, after much salutary sea- 
sickness, they are shot out on the shores of conveniently pestilential 
Cayennes and Nouka-Hivas* A plague on such clubs and clubbists, 
say I, with their long hair, flapped waistcoats, and coffee-shop treason- 
able practices. They have done more harm to the cause of Liberty 
than all the wicked kings and kaisers, from Dionysius to the late 
Bomba — now gone to his reward, and who is enjoying it, I should 
say, hot and hot by this time — have done to the true and heaven- 
ordained principle of royalty. 

In Imperial Paris there are yet clubs of another sort existing, 
though jealously watched by a police that would be Argus-eyed if 
its members were not endowed with a centuple power of squinting. 
There are clubs — the " Jockey," the " Chemin de Fer," and estab- 
lishments with great gilded saloons, and many servitors in plush and 
silk stockings ; but they are no more like our frank English clubs 
than I am like Antinous. Mere gambling shops and arenas for foolish 
wagers ; mere lounging-places for spendthrifts, sham gentlemen, gilt- 
fustian senators, and Imperialist patricians, with dubious titles, who 

o 



202 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

haunt club-rooms, sit up late, and intoxicate themselves with alcoholic 
mixtures — so aping the hardy sons of Britain, when they would be ten 
times more at home in their own pleasant, frivolous Boulevard cafes, 
with a box of dominoes, a glass of sugar- and- water, and Alphonso the 
garcon to bring it to them. Such pseudo-aristocratic clubs you may 
find, too, at Berlin and Vienna, scattered up and down north Italy, 
and in Russia, even, at Petersburg and Moscow, where they have 
"English'' clubs, into which Englishmen are seldom, if ever, 
admitted. Some English secretaries of legation and long-legged 
attaches, have indeed an ez-officio entry to these continental clubs, or 
" cercles^ where they come to lounge and yawn in the true Pall Mall 
fashion ; but they soon grow tired of the hybrid places ; and the 
foreigners who come to stare and wonder at them, go away more tired 
still, and, with droll shrugs, say, " Que c est triste /" The proper 
club for a Frenchman in his cafe ; for, without a woman to admire 
him or to admire, your Monsieur cannot exist ; and in the slowest 
provincial town in France there is a dame de comptoir to ogle or be 
ogled. The Russian has more of the clubable element in him ; but 
clubs will never flourish in Muscovy till a man can be morally certain 
that the anecdote he is telling his neighbour will not be carried, with 
notes and emendations, in half an hour, to the Grand Master of Police. 
As for the German, put him in a beer-shop, and give him a long pipe 
with his mawkish draught, and — be he prince, professor, or peasant — 
he will desire no better club ; save, indeed, on high convivial occa- 
sions, when you had best prepare him a cellar, where he and his 
blond-bearded, spectacled fellows may sit round a wine-cask, and play 
cards on the top thereof. 

I don't exactly know how far the English club-shoot has been 
grafted on the trunk of American society, but I can't believe that the 
club-proper flourishes there to any great extent. I like the Americans 
much, recognising in them many noble, generous, upright, manly 
qualities ; but I am afraid they are too fond of asking questions — too 
ignorant or unmindful of the great art of sitting half an hour in the 
company of a man whom you know intimately, without saying a word 
to him, to be completely clubable. Moreover, they are a people who 
drink standing, delighting much to "liquor up" in crowded bar- 
rooms, and seldom sitting down to their potations — a most unclub- 
able characteristic. All sorts of convivial and political reunions 
exist, I am aware, in the United States, to a high degree of organisa- 
tion; and I have heard glowing accounts of the comfortable, club- 



THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS YAN. 203 

like guard-rooms and stations of the New York volunteers and fire- 
men ; but I can't exactly consider these in the light of clubs. They 
are not exclusive enough — not concrete enough — not subject to the 
rigid but salutary discipline of that Imperium in Imperio, or rather, 
jRempuhlicam in Repablicd, the committee of a club. 

In England, the Ancient Order of Druids were undeniably the first 
clubmen, keeping things remarkably snug, and delighting much in 
house- dinners at the sign of the Misletoe, where a roasted Ancient 
Briton was no rare dish. It might aid, too, to clear up the puzzling 
enigma of Stonehenge — who built it, and how, and why ? — if we were 
to look upon Druidism in a purely club-light. I should like to know 
whence the money came which the Megatherium or the Mastodon 
Clubs in Pall Mall cost to build. We know that Captain Threadbare, 
late of the Rifles, that the Hon. Jemmy O'Nuftin, respectively mem- 
bers of those grand cenacles, didn't find the money ; that they never 
paid anything towards their clubs, save the entrance fee and the sub- 
scription ; and that they dine there, nine months out of the year, for 
eighteen-pence. Other members did, do, will do the same ; yet there 
the club stands, stately and superb, with its columns of multi-coloured 
marbles, its stately halls, its sumptuous furniture, its army of liveried 
lacqueys. A belted earl might ruin himself in building such a man- 
sion ; yet Captain Threadbare and Jemmy O'Nuffin call it their club, 
and it is theirs to all intents and purposes. Cunning men, when you 
express excusable wonder at the thing, whisper, " Debentures !" and 
debentures seem in truth to have been thfe seven hundred times seven 
gifted servants, who have hoisted this Fortunio of a place to its proud 
position. Why should not Stonehenge have been built by de- 
bentures ? 

The old Saxon Wittenagemotte must have been strongly impreg- 
nated with the club element ; and the resemblance of clubs to parlia- 
ments has come down to this day. What, after all, is our much- 
vaunted British House of Commons but a club of the first water, 
somewhat more exclusive than its brethren of St. James's, and black- 
balling its scores of candidates every general election ? It has its 
reading-rooms, coffee-rooms, and smoking-rooms; the members lounge 
in and out, and loll on forms and benches, just as they would do in 
Pall Mall ; and while some fixe hundred members indulge in the real 
dolce far niente of club life, smoking, and reading, and dawdling, and 
dozing, and refreshing themselves, and never troubling themselves 
about club matters, save when they are called upon to vote, the affairs 



201 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

of the club (and of the nation too, by the way) are managed by a 
snug little committee, who do all the work and all the talking, and are 
continually popping themselves into snug little berths connected with 
the management of that other great club which lies beyond the walls 
of St. Stephen's, and is called the Country. 

And the middle ages, sunk as the unthinking believe them to have 
been in barbarism, had their clubs, and brave ones too. Thorough 
clubmen were the old Freemasons ; secret and sturdy, and swift in 
action ; and it's ! to see the club-houses they erected in the fanes 
that are yet the pride and glory of our cathedral towns. When you 
look at their crenelated towers, and at the strange sculptures in the 
rich spandrils of their arches, in their groins and corbels, in their 
buttresses and great rose windows, and cunningly-traced roodscreens 
and carved bench-ends, you shall find copious store of club-marks, 
and secret signs, and passes only known to themselves, and, grotesque 
and frivolous as to the uninitiated they seem, truly drawn from the 
innermost arcana of the great mystery of masonry. The old Vehm- 
gericht, too, with its grim symbols, and warnings of the cord and 
dagger — may not that be considered as a club ? The Flagellants and 
the Eosicrucians, were not those queer sects clubs ? and what were 
the Council of Trent, and the Diet of Worms, but select clubs, fre- 
quented by ecclesiastical and political "swells?" 

I am not about to confound the convivial club — with its one room 
and its quaint rules, ancient or modern — with its latest perfection, all 
Portland stone and plate-glass, gas chandeliers, and luxurious otto- 
mans. Before, however, I come to the fashionable club of 1859, I 
may be permitted, I hope, to discourse for awhile on the jovial clubs, 
high, low, and middle class, which have made this metropolis cosy 
and picturesque for at least two centuries. 

There can be little doubt that the Restoration gave a marvellous 
incentive to club-life in London. On the one hand, the sour Puritans 
and fierce Independents, driven into holes and corners by the advent 
of Charles II., had other places of meeting than the conventicles 
where they offered their surreptitious worship ; and at these stray 
places of re-union, they comforted and refected themselves in their 
own grim, uncomfortable fashion. On the other hand, the Cavaliers 
had their riotous assemblages, where they met to sing " Down among 
the dead men," and drink their king's health on their knees ; the 
revival of humorous and theatrical literature filled the taverns and 
coffee-houses with wits and dramatists, instead of pedants and theolo- 



THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PEISQNEBS TAN. 205 

gians ; table companions formed into knots, and knots into throngs, 
and these at length formed themselves into clubs, where they could 
jest and criticise, argue and carouse, at their ease, without the fear of 
interlopers ; and though, so late as the days of Foote and Chatterton, 
a stranger of good address and brilliant conversation could form a 
rallying coffee-house acquaintance with the most famous wits of the 
town, it was difficult for him to be admitted into their inner circle; 
even as, in our own time, a man may find plenty of conversation in a 
railway carriage or an hotel coffee-room, at a German Spa or a charity 
dinner, but must not feel surprised if his voluble acquaintance of 
the previous evening cut him dead the next time he meets him. 
The change of succession at the Revolution gave an impetus both to 
the establishment and to the exclusiveness of the clubs. While 
William, the Dutchman, held his uneasy, hooked-nose pre-eminence 
in this country, innumerable were the dim taverns in whose securest 
rooms stealthy clubs, with cabalistic names, were held ; where, when 
the club-room doors were tightly closed, Captain Henchman, late of 
Roper's horse, turned out to be Father Slyboots, high up in the order 
of Jesus, where sympathy was openly avowed for Sir John Fenwick, 
and the exiles of St. Germains were yet spoken of as the possessors 
of the Crown; and where, after William's death, the health of " the 
little gentleman in black velvet," meaning the molehill over which, 
according to the Jacobites, the king's horse had stumbled, when 
William fell and dislocated his collar-bone, was enthusiastically drunk. 
It would have been hard, too, if the days of Queen Anne — the 
Augustan era in which Swift, Gay, Pope, Addison, Prior, Boling- 
broke, Somers, and Dorset, held their glorious sway of intellect — had 
not been fruitful in the production of clubs ; and it is to the first 
quarter of the eighteenth century that we may trace the birth of our 
most famous clubs. The accession of George the First, embittering 
as it did a new question of the succession to the throne, gave a fresh 
lease of popularity to the Jacobite clubs, which had languished some- 
what during the reign of Anne, for sheer want of something to con- 
spire about. They were held all over London : in taverns and mug- 
houses, in the purlieus of Westminster and the Mint in Southwark, 
and in the multitudinous courts and alleys about Cornhill and the 
Exchange. How I should like to have seen one of these old honest, 
wrong-headed Jacobite club meetings ! There was our old friend 
Captain Henchman, alias Father Slyboots, grown gray in conspiring; 
always in active correspondence with Rome and St. Germains, Douai 



206 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

and St. Omer, and, as of yore, fiercely hunted by Mr. Secretary's 
messengers, from his Majesty's Cockpit, at Whitehall. There were 
old Roman Catholic baronets and squires, from. Lancashire and 
Cheshire, who would as soon have thought of surrendering their an- 
cestral faith in the false and fickle Stuarts, as of abandoning their old 
shields of arms and trees of descent ; there were, hot-headed young 
counsellers from the Temple ; and otherwise steady-going Jacobite 
mercers, and goldsmiths, and vintners, whose loyalty to the dethroned 
house had somewhat of a commercial tinge in it, as you see now 
radical hatters and grocers proud to blazon the Royal arms above 
their doors, and the Lord Chamberlain's warrant in their windows, as 
" purveyors, by appointment, to her most Gracious Majesty." The 
landlord was a staunch Jacobite, of course ; how, indeed, should he 
be otherwise ? His grandfather had fought at Naseby field ; and his 
father had furnished one of King Charles the Second's madams with 
clove-gillyflower water, and had never been paid for it. The drawer 
was Jacobite to the backbone (he turned traitor afterwards, it is true ; 
was the means of hanging half the club, and retired with a handsome 
competence to the plantations, where he was exceedingly prosperous 
in the export of tobacco and the import of kidnapped children, and died 
elder and deacon) — but who but he brought in the great China bowl 
filled with a clear fluid, across which the company drank, with clasped 
hands, the toast of " The king over the water." Ah, days of furious 
party and faction differences, but of self-sacrificing honour and loyalty, 
ye shall return no more ! It was lucky for the Jacobite club-men when 
their convivialities were not interrupted by the irruption through the 
window of a party of the Foot Guards, who had climbed over the 
adjoining tiles. Traitors were always in their camp : spies always 
watching them. The English ambassador in Paris knew of their 
goings on, and revealed their bacchanalian machinations to wary Mr. 
Secretary at the Cockpit ; and every now and then would come a tide 
of evil days, and the venue of the club would be changed ; Father 
Slyboots would go into closer hiding, baffling pursuit as a verger of 
Westminster Abbey, compounding with skippers of smuggling luggers 
for conveyance to Dunkirk or Fecamp, crouching in the " priest's 
hole " of some old Roman Catholic mansion of the North country, or 
indeed, good man, as the times were very bad, purchasing a stout horse 
and betaking himself to the road with Captain Macheath and Cornet 
O'Gibbet, and Duvalising travellers, — of course confining himself to 
those who were of the Hanoverian way of thinking. Not the first 



THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS VAN. 207 

honest man who has turned highwayman : besides, was it not for the 
greater glory of Church and King ? 'When the club had its next 
meeting, it might be in '16 or in '46 (for the century was quite gray- 
headed before the Jacobite clubs quite died out), there would be a 
lamentable hiatus here and there in the list of members. Where was 
Sir William Flowerdeluce ? — Shot at Sheriffmuir. Where Colonel 
Belmain ? — Hanged at Carlisle. Where young Christopher Layer, the 
barrister, gallant, devoted, enthusiastic ? — His head was rotting on a 
spike, over Temple Bar, within sight of his old chambers. Where 
Jemmy Dawson, the pride, the pet, the pearl of the Jacobites, the 
dashing swordsman of Towrdey's ill-fated Manchester Regiment ? — Go 
ask the judge and jury, go ask the hangman, go ask the veiled lady 
in the black coach, who follows the fatal hurdle to Kennington 
Common, and sits out the hideous drama, and when she sees the 
heart of him she loves cast into the flames, and his fair limbs dis- 
membered by the executioner, swoons and dies. 

I have been reading a little old book, bearing the date of 1725, 
which professes to give a " Complete Account" of the principal clubs 
of London and Westminster. Its authorship is anonymous; yet I 
think I can discern traces of a certain fine Roman hand, well-known 
to me, in its composition, and I don't think I am in error in ascribing 
it to Mr. Ned Ward, the scurrilous though amusing author of the 
" London Spy." Its contents must be taken, of course, cum grano 
salts, with the other lucubrations of that diverting vagabond ; yet I 
am ready to believe that many of his clubs were then existent. Some 
of them, indeed, have come down to our own times. According to the 
writer of the " Complete Account," there was the "Virtuous Club," 
established as a succursal to the Royal Society (which, indeed, was 
little more than a club at its commencement), at the Golden Fleece, a 
tavern in Comhill, whence they moved to the Three Tuns, in South- 
wark : a queer locality, indeed, for the white-neckclothed savants, 
who now have their habitat in Burlington House. The chronicler 
treats them somewhat contemptuously, as collectors of " pickled 
maggots and mummies' toenails," and seems considerably to prefer the 
" Surly Club," held at some out-of-the-way place near Billingsgate 
Dock, whose members had " a stoker to attend their fire" — I did not 
know the appellation " stoker " was so old— a skinker to ignify their 
pipes, and a chalk accountant to keep a trencher register of the club 
reckoning, lest the landlord below should be tempted to augment the 
scot by means of a double -notched chalk. The principal feature of the 



208 TWICE SOUND THE CLOCK. 

" Surly Club " appeared to lie in the members being all surly, ill- 
tempered, wrangling chuffs, who were bound to abuse each other 
and the world generally, at their every time of meeting. I believe 
that there are London clubs, not yet extinct, which carry out the 
principles of the " Surly Club" in a remarkably undeviating manner. 
Then there was the " Split-Farthing Club," instituted by a society of 
usurers and money-spinners, who met together in the dark, in order to 
avoid the expense of candle or lamp-light, and of which the Hopkins 
immortalised by Pope was a distinguished member. The " Ugly 
Club " (which yet flourishes, I believe,) owed its foundation to a 
superlatively ugly fellow r by the name of Hatchet (whence the term 
" hatchet-faced "), who had a nose of such immense size, that he was 
one day in the street charged by a butcher-boy with overturning a 
tray full of meat, when his head w r as at least a foot distant therefrom. 
A violent attempt was made to break up the "Ugly Club" by a 
committee of spinsters, who made unheard-of attempts to marry the 
members en masse, but in vain. Jack Wilkes was elected perpetual 
president of the " Ugly Club," early in the reign of George III., and 
Honore Gabriel Riquetti, Count de Mirabeau, who had some slight 
connection with the first French Revolution, w T as unanimously chosen 
an honorary member on his visit to England. I must not forget to 
mention the " Unfortunate Club," held at the sign of the " Tumble- 
down Dick," in the Mint. To have been at least once bankrupt (a 
fraudulent failure was preferred), or to have come in some way in 
collision with the laws of the country, was a sine qua non in the qua- 
lification for a member of the " Unfortunates." The Market Women's? 
or " Flat- cap Club," was at one time quite a fashionable place of 
meeting, being frequented by many of the wild gallants from the Rose, 
and Tom King's coffee-house, who treated the lady company to burnt 
brandy and flowing " Winchesters " (?'. e., Winchester measures) of 
" powerful three thread " — our modern porter. Then there was the 
" Lying Club," among whose voluminous rules were these, that the 
chairman was to wear a blue cap and a red feather, and that if any 
member, in the course of an evening, told a lie more impudent and 
egregious than he, the chairman, could manage to cap, he was at once 
to vacate the chair in favour of the superior Mendax. There was a 
very stringent rule, inflicting a severe fine upon any member who 
should presume, between the hours of nine and eleven of the clock, to 
tell one word of truth, unless, indeed, he prefaced it with the rider of 
" By your leave, Sir Harry" — Sir Harry Gulliver being the name of 



THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS TAN. 209 

the original chairman of the club. There was the i( No-Nose Club," 
the " Beggars' Club," the " Thieves' Club," and the " Northern or 
Yorkshire Tyke's Club ; " and, to sum up, there was a horrific assembly, 
founded in the reign of Charles II., and called the "Man-killing 
Club." The members of this savage corporation were debased Life- 
guardsmen, broken-down bullies, and old scarified prize-fighters. 
The prime qualification for membership was the commission of ho- 
micide. 4t The " Mohocks," " Scourers," and " Sweaters " of Queen 
Anne's time, were, as may readily be imagined, highly prominent 
members of this murderous fraternity, which might have flourished 
much longer but for the interference of the Sheriff's hangman in 
ordinary, who disposed of the members with such amazing despatch 
and persistence, that the club could not at last form a quorum, and 
was so dissolved. 

The " Irish Fortune-hunters' Club " I am somewhat chary of recog- 
nising, for I am afraid that it existed only in the lively fancy of Mr. 
Ned Ward or his imitator. There is, indeed, a copy of some resolu- 
tions of the club appended to the " Complete Account," but I am 
inclined to consider them apocryphal. Leave, by these resolutions, is 
given to Captain Donahoo to change his name to Talbot Howard 
Somerset ; Captain Macgarret is empowered to change the place of his 
nativity from Connemara to Cornwall ; and Lieutenant Dunshunner is 
presented with a suit of laced camlet at the club expense, in order to 
his successfully prosecuting his suit with Miss Bridget Tallboys, " with 
ten thousand pounds fortune ; in the event of which happy consumma- 
tion, he is to repay the price of the suit with interest, and moreover to 
release from his captivity at the Gate-house the club secretary, therein 
confined, on suspicion of debt." 

Very different is the bran-new modern club whose interior my 
faithful artist has depicted, and whose appearance at fiye o'clock 
in the afternoon I am now called upon to describe. Gentlemen mem- 
bers of clubs, these gorgeous palaces are but the growth of one genera- 
tion. Your fathers had, it is true, their Wattier's, the Cocoa-Tree, 
White's, and Boodle's, but those were considerably more like gambling- 
houses than clubs. To obtain admission was exceedingly difficult, and 
to remain a member was, save to men of immense fortune, absolutely 
ruinous. Hundreds of the superior middle-classes, nay, even of the 
aristocracy, who would consider themselves social Pariahs now-a-days, 
if they did not belong to one or more clubs, were perfectly content, a 
score of years since, to frequent the coffee-rooms of hotels and taverns. 



210 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

A modern London club is the very looking-glass of the time ; of the 
gay, glittering, polished, improved utilitarian, material age. Nothing- 
more can be done for a palace than the fitters-up of a modern club 
have done for it. The march of upholstering intellect is there in its 
entirety. It must be almost bewildering to the modest half-pay 
captain or the raw young ensign, to the country gentleman, the book- 
worm fellow of his college, or the son of the country squire, fresh 
from dog-breaking and superintending the drains on his father's 
estate, to find themselves suddenly transferred from the quiet lodgings 
in St. Alban's Place, the whitewashed barrack-room, the ivy-grown 
parsonage, the tranquil oak-sporting rooms of " Keys " or " Maudlin," 
the dull comfort of the country mansion-house, to this great hector- 
ing palace, of which he is the twelve -hundreth part proprietor, and 
where he may live on the fatness of the land, and like a lord of the 
creation, for twenty guineas entrance fee, and a subscription of ten 
guineas a year. He has a joint- stock proprietorship in all this 
splendour ; in the lofty halls and vestibules ; in the library, coffee- 
rooms, newspaper and card-rooms ; in the secretary's office in the 
basement, and in the urbane secretary himself; in the kitchen, fitted 
with every means and appliance, every refinement of culinary 
splendour, and from whence are supplied to him at cost prices dishes 
that would make Lucullus wild with envy, and that are cooked for 
him, besides, by the great chef from Paris, Monsieur Nini Casserole, 
who has a piano and a picture-gallery in the kitchen — belongs, him- 
self, to a club, little less aristocratic than his masters', and writes his 
bills of fare upon laced-edged note-paper. From the gorgeous foot- 
men in plush and silk- covered calves, which the flunkeys of duchesses 
could scarcely rival, to the little foot-page in buttons; from the letter- 
racks to the French-polished peg on which he hangs his hat in the 
hall ; from the books in the library to the silver spoons in the plate- 
basket ; from the encaustic mosaic on the pavement of the hall to 
the topmost turreted chimney-pot — he has a vested interest in all. 
He cannot waste, he cannot alienate, it is true ; he can but enjoy. 
Debentures have taken care of that ; yet the fee-simple is in part 
his ; he is the possessor of an entailed estate ; yet, for all purposes of 
present enjoyment, he sits under his own roof on his own ground, and 
eats his own mutton off his own plate, with bis own knife and fork. 
Oh ! the wonderful workings of debentures, and the inestimable 
benefits they confer on genteel persons with expensive tastes and 
small incomes ! Do you know that a man may drink wines at his 



THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS YAN. 211 

club, such as, were he to order them at an hotel, the head waiter 
would hold up his hands at the extravagance of the order, or else 
imagine that he had Rothschild or Mr. Roupell dining in No. 4 box ; 
nay, might perchance run round to the chambermaid to ask how much 
luggage the gentleman had. Rare ports, " worn-out ports," grown 
colourless from age and strength, that cannot be looked at without 
winking — wondrous bitter Sherries — strange yellow Rhine wines, that 
gurgle in the glass when poured out — Claret that has made bankrupt 
the proprietors of the vignobles who grew them, or else sent them mad 
to think their stock was out — indescribable Cognacs — Maraschinos 
and Curagoas that filtrate like rich oil : all these are stored by special 
wine-merchants in the cellars of the club. The chief butler himself, 
a prince among the winepots, goes forth jauntily to crack sales, and 
purchases, standing, the collections of cunning amateurs in wines. 
You shall smoke such cigars at a club as would make Senor Cabana 
himself wonder where they were purchased. Everything is of the best, 
and everything is cheap ; only the terms are, as the cheap tailors 
say, "for ready money." Tick is the exception, not the rule, at a 
club ; though there have been Irish members who have run goodly 
scores in their time with the cook and the waiter. 

A man may, if he be so minded, make his club his home ; living 
and lounging luxuriously, and grazing to his heart's content on the 
abundant club-house literature, and enjoying the conversation of club 
friends. Soap and towels, combs and hair-brushes, are provided in 
the lavatories ; and there are even some clubs that have bed-rooms in 
their upper storeys, for the use of members. In those that are 
deficient in such sleeping accommodation, it is only necessary to have 
a tooth-brush and an attic in an adjacent bye- street ; all the rest can 
be provided at the club. Thus it is that, in the present generation, 
has been created a type peculiar thereunto — the club-man. He is all 
of the club, and clubby. He is full of club matters, club gossip. He 
dabbles in club intrigues, belongs to certain club cliques, and takes 
part in club quarrels. No dinners are so good to him as the club 
dinners ; he can read no journals but those he finds in the club news- 
paper-room ; he writes his letters on the club paper, pops them into 
club envelopes, seals them with the club seal, and despatches them, if 
they are not intended for postage, by the club messengers. He is 
rather sorry that there is no club uniform. He would like, when he 
dies, to be buried in a club coffin, in the club cemetery, and to be fol- 
lowed to the grave by the club, with members of the committee as 



212 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS TAN. 213 

pall-bearers. As it is, when lie has shuffled off this mortal coil, his 
name appears on a board among the list of "members deceased." 
That is his epitaph, his hatchment, his oraison funibre. 

The great complaint against clubs is, that they tend towards the 
germination of selfishness, exclusiveness, and isolation ; that they are 
productive of neglect of home duties in married men, and of irre- 
vocable celibacy in bachelors. Reserving my own private opinion on 
this knotty point, I may say that it is a subject for sincere congratula- 
tion that there are no ladies' clubs. We have been threatened with 
them sometimes, but they have always been nipped in the bud. It is 
curious to see how fiercely this tolerant, liberal, large-headed creature, 
Man, has waged war against the slightest attempt to establish a club 
on the part of the gentler sex. From the Parisian malecontents of the 
first revolution, who broke into the lady assemblies of the Jacobines 
and Tricoteuses, and broke up the clubs in question by the very expedi- 
tious process of turning the fair members into the street, after sub- 
jecting them to a castigation whose use is ordinarily confined to the 
nursery ; from those ungallant anti-clubbists (they all belonged to 
clubs themselves, you may be sure) to Mr. Mark Lemon, who, in a 
petite co?nedie f brought the guns of satire to bear with terrible effect on 
an incipient agitation for lady clubbism, such institutions, on the part 
of the ladies, have always been put down, either by violence or by 
ridicule. The Tyrant Man is even, I am informed, disposed to look 
with jealousy on the " committees of ladies " which exist in connection 
with some deserving charities, and on the "Dorcas societies" and 
" sewing circles " of provincial towns ; and all meetings to advocate 
the rights of woman, he utterly abhors. 

I daresay that you would very much like to know the name of the 
particular club, the tableau of which adorns this sheet, and would 
feel obliged if I would point out the portraits of individual members : 
you would be very much pleased to be told whether it is the Carlton, 
the Reform, the Travellers', the Atheneeum, the Union, the United 
Service Senior or Junior, the Guards, the Oriental, the Oxford and 
Cambridge, the Parthenon, the Erectheum, the Wyndham, Whyte's,. 
Boodle's, or the Army and Navy. No, Fatima; no, Sister Anne. 
You shall not be told. Clubbism is a great mystery, and its adepts 
must be cautious how they explain its shibboleth to the outer bar- 
barians. Men have been expelled from clubs ere now for talking or 
writing about another member's whiskers, about the cut of his coat, 
and the manner in which he eats asparagus. I have no desire for 



214 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

such club-ostracism ; for though, Heaven help me, I am not of Pall 
Mall or St. James's, I, too, have a club whose institutes I revere. 
" Non me tuafervida terrent, dicta, Ferox :" I fear not Jawkins, nor 
all the Borekins in Borekindom ; but " Dii me terrent, et Jupiter 
host is : " I fear the awful committee that, with a dread complacency, 
can unclub a man for a few idle words inadvertently spoken, and blast 
his social position for an act of harmless indiscretion. 

Clubs, after all, are rather pleasant institutions than otherwise, yet 
they have not escaped the lash of the moralist. Turning over, as I 
dismiss the subject, the leaves of my little old book, I come on the 
following passage : " Though the Promotion of Trade, and the Benefits 
that arise from Conversation, are the Specious Pretences that every 
Club or Society are apt to assign as a Reasonable Plea for their Un- 
profitable Meetings, yet more Considerate Men have found by Ex- 
perience that the End thereof is a Promiscuous Encouragement of 
Vice, Faction, and Folly, and the Unnecessary Expense of that Time 
and Money which might much better be Employed in their own 
Business, or spent with much more Comfort in their Several Families." 
I don't say what the ladies' verdict will be on this opinion, though I 
can divine it ; but I take off my hat to the moralist, capital letters 
and all, and, leaving him to grumble, will be off to the club. 

Stay, stay, siste viator : I have an appointment. When have I not ? 
I begin to think that I am the Wandering Jew, and there is decidedly 
no rest for the soles of my feet. Still the cry is " onward." Wherever 
that club of mine may be situated, it is clear that I must bend my 
course towards Bow Street, Covent Garden. 

And why to Bow Street, an't please you ? To gaze upon the resus- 
citated glories of the Boyal Italian Opera ? To dine at Nokes's 
succulent restaurant, where erst was the " Garrick's Head?" To 
obtain an order for admission to the workhouse from the relieving 
officer of the Strand Union Office ? To hire theatrical costumes at 
Mr. May's ? or to bail a friend out of the station-house ? Not so. 
And yet my business has something to do with the metropolitan 
police. I wish to witness the departure of the Prisoners' Van. 

About five p.m. the ladies and gentlemen who, through the arbitra- 
tion of Mr. Hall, Mr. Jardine, or Mr. Henry, stipendiary magistrates, 
have settled their little differences with Justice, are conveyed to those 
suburban residences, in which, for the benefit of their health, and in 
the interests of society, it is judged necessary, par qui de droit, they 
shall for a stated term abide. The vehicle which bears them to their 



THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS' VAN. 215 

temporary seclusion enjoys different names ; some technical, others 
simply humorous. By some it is called " Her Majesty's Carriage," 
from the fact that the crown and the initials "V. B,." are painted on 
the panels. More far-fetched wags call it " Long Tom's Coffin." 
The police and the reporters, for shortness, call it " The Van." In 
this vehicle the malefactors who have in the course of the day been 
arraigned before the tribunal of the Bow Street Police-court, are con- 
veyed to the various jails and houses of correction in and about the 
metropolis, there to undergo the several terms of imprisonment and 
hard labour, as the case may be, to which they have been sentenced. 
Sometimes the court sits late, and the van does not take its departure 
before half-past five ; but five is the ordinary time when the great 
black, shining, cellular omnibus, drawn by two strong horses, with its 
policeman driver, and policeman conductor in a snug little watch-box, 
rolls away from Bow Street. It is a prison on wheels, a peripatetic 
penitentiary, a locomotive hulk. Criminals both in and out of prison 
regard it with a species of terror, not unmixed with admiration, and, 
as is their wont, they have celebrated it in that peculiar strain of 
ballad poetry for which London roguery has been so long distinguished. 
In that celebrated collection of dishonest epics, the " Drury Lane 
Garland," in fit companionship w r ith "Sam Hall," "County Jail," 
" Seven years I got for priggin'," and the " Leary Man," I find a 
ballad on the subject of the Bow Street chariot of disgrace, of which 
the refrain is — 

" Sing Wentilator, separate cell, 
Its long, and dark, and hot as well. 
Sing locked-up doors — git out if you can, 
There's a crusher outside the prisoners' wan I " 

A " crusher," or policeman, there is indeed, not only in the little 
watch-box on the exterior, to which I have alluded, but in the narrow 
corrider between the cells into which the carriage is divided in the 
interior. It is the former functionary's duty to keep the outer door 
securely locked ; the latter to take care that no communication takes 
place between the passengers confined in this penal omnibus, either 
through the ventilators on the roof, or by talismanic tappings at the 
panels which divide them. 

When the hour of departure arrives, you see the pavement and 
carriage-w r ay of Bow Street studded with a choice assemblage of the 
raggedry, ruffianry, felonry, misery, drunkardry, and drabbery, whom 
the infamous hundred of Drury, and the scarcely less infamous tithing 



216 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AXB THE PRISONERS VAN. 217 

of Covent, have cast out into a thoroughfare which, two hours hence, 
will be re-echoing to the wheels of carriages bearing noble lords and 
ladies to listen to the delicious Bosio (alas !) in the " Traviata," or the 
enchanting notes of Tamberlik in " Otello." London is full of violent 
contrasts ; but this is the grimmest in the whole strange catalogue. 
See, the warder in the watch-box has descended from his perch, and 
with a patent key opened the portal of the van, revealing a second 
janitor inside. And now the passengers destined for the lugubrious 
journey come tumbling out of the court door, and down the steps 
towards the van. Some handcuffed, some with their arms folded, or 
their hands thrust in their pockets in sullen defiance; some hiding 
their faces in their grimy palms for very shame. There are women as 
well as men, starved sempstresses, and brazen courtezans in tawdry 
finery. There are wicked graybeards, and children on whose angel 
faces the devil has already set his indelible brand. There are ragged 
losels rejoicing to go to jail as to a place where they shall at least have 
bread to eat and a bed to lie on ; there are dashing pickpockets in 
shiny hats and pegtop trousers braided down the seams. There are 
some going to prison for the first, and some for the fiftieth time. One 
by one they are thrust rather than handed into the van. The shabby 
crowd gives a faint, derisive cheer, the door bangs, the policeman- 
conductor ensconces himself in his watch-box, and the Prisoners' Yan 
drives off. 

The Pharisee thanked Heaven that he was not " as that Publican." 
Down on your knees, well-nurtured, well-instructed youth, and thank 
Heaven for the parents and friends, for the pastors and masters, to 
whose unremitting care and tenderness, from your cradle upwards, 
you owe it that you are not like one of these miserable Publicans just 
gone away in the prisoners' van. But thank Heaven humbly, not 
pharisaically. A change at nurse, the death of a parent — one out of 
the fifty thousand accidents that beset life — might have thrown you 
into the sink of misery and want, foulness and crime, in which these 
creatures were reared, and you might have been here to-day, not gazing 
on the spectacle with a complacent pity, but trundled with manacles 
on your wrists into this moving pest-house, whose half-way house is 
the jail, and whose bourne is the gallows. 



218 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 



SIX P.M.— A CHARITY DINNER, AND THE NEWSPAPER 
WINDOW AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE. 

Some years ago, at tlie cozy little dining club held in my friend 
Madame Busque's back-parlour, in the Rue de la Miehodiere, and 
the city of Paris, I had the advantage of the friendship of one of the 
most intelligent and humorous of the American gentlemen. There is 
such a personage — the vulgar, drawling, swearing, black-satin- vested, 
stove-pipe-hatted ; whittling, smoking, expectorating, and dram-drink- 
ing Yankee loafers, who infest the Continent, notwithstanding ; and a 
very excellent sample of the accomplished and unpretending gentleman 
was the American in question. He had paid a visit to England, in 
which country his sojourn had been of about three months' duration ; 
but he frankly confessed to me that having come purposely unprovided 
with those usually tiresome and worthless figments, letters of intro- 
duction — the very Dead-Sea apples of hospitality, goodly on the 
exterior, and all dust and ashes within— he had not, with the excep- 
tion of his banker, who asked him to dinner once as a courteous 
acknowledgment of the ponderosity of his letter of credit, possessed 
one single acquaintance, male or female, during his stay in the metro- 
polis of the world. I asked him whether he had not felt very lonely 
and miserable, and sufficiently inclined, at the end of the first week, to 
cast himself over any given bridge into the river Thames. Not in the 
slightest degree, he replied. I politely hinted that perhaps, as an 
American, he possessed the genial facility, common to his countrymen, 
of making himself at home wheresoever he went, and of forming 
agreeable travelling acquaintances, occasionally ripening into fast 
friends, by the simple process of saying " Fine day, stranger." Not 
at all, he replied. He kept himself to himself, and indeed he was of 
a disposition, save in casual moments of unbending, quite surprising 
for its saturnine taciturnity. At all events, I urged, he could not have 
amused himself much by prowling about the streets, sleeping at 
hotels, dining in coffee-rooms, frequenting theatres and singing-rooms, 
and wandering in and out of museums ; but I was wrong again, he 
said. He had seldom been so jolly in his life. I began to think 
either that he was quizzing me — " gumming" is the proper Transat- 
lantic colloquialism, I think — or else that he was the Happy Man 



SIX P.M. A CHARITY DIN^EK. 219 

described in the Eastern apologue. But then, the Happy Man had, 
as it turned out, no shirt; and my American was remarkable for dis- 
playing a vast amount of fine linen, both at breast and wristbands, 
profusely decorated with studs, chains, and sleeve-buttons. How 
was it, then, I asked, giving the enigma up in sheer bewilderment. 
" Wall, 7 ' answered my friend with his own peculiar dry chuckle, " I 
used to ride about all day on the tops of the omnibuses ; and very fine 
institutions for seeing life in a philosophical spirit, those omnibuses of 
yours are, sir." He said Sir — not " Sirree," as Anglo-Americans are 
ordinarily assumed to pronounce that title of courtesy. I understood 
him at once ; saw through him ; had done the same thing myself; and 
admired his penetrative and observant aptitude. 

Never ride inside an omnibus— I apostrophise, of course, the men 
folks ; for till arrangements are made (and why should they not be 
made ?) for hoisting ladies in an easy-chair to the breezy roof — they 
can manage such things on board a man-of-war — -the vehicular ascent 
is incommodious, not to say indecorous, for the fair sex. But Ho, ye 
men, don't ride inside. A friend of mine had once his tibia fractured 
by the diagonal brass rod that crosses the door ; the door itself be- 
ing violently slammed to, as is the usual custom, by the conductor. 
Another of my acquaintance was pitched head foremost from the 
interior, on the mockingly fallacious cry of " all right" being given — 
was thrown on his head, and killed. Inside an omnibus you are 
subjected to innumerable vexations and annoyances. Sticks or parasols 
are poked in your chest and in the back of your neck, as a polite 
reminder that somebody wants to get out, and that you must seize the 
conductor by the skirt of his coat, or pinch him in the calf of the leg, 
as an equally polite request for him to stop ; you are half suffocated 
by the steam of clamp umbrellas ; your toes are crushed to atoms as 
the passengers alight or ascend; you are very probably the next 
neighbour to persons suffering under vexatious ailments, such as 
asthma, simple cold in the head, or St. Vitus's dance ; it is ten to one 
but that you suffer under the plague of babies ; and, five days out of 
the seven, you will have a pickpocket, male or female, for a fellow- 
passenger. The rumbling, the jumbling, the jolting, and the con- 
cussions—the lurking ague in the straw when it is wet, and the 
peculiar omnibus fleas that lurk in it when it is dry, make the interior 
of one of these vehicles a place of terror and discomfort ; whereas 
outside all is peace. You have room for your legs; you have the 
fresh air ; you have the lively if not improving conversation of the 



220 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

driver and the conductor, and especially of the right-hand box-seat, 
who is invariably in some way mysteriously connected with dogs and 
horses, and a great authority thereupon. Finally, you have the 
inestimable advantage of surveying the world in its workings as you 
pass along : of being your own Asmodeus, and unroofing London in a 
ride from the White Horse Cellar to Hammersmith Gate. The things 
I have seen from the top of an omnibus ! — more markedly in the 
narrow streets through which, from the main thoroughfare being 
blocked up by the incessant paving, lighting, sewerage, or electric 
telegraph communications of underground London, one is compelled 
to pass. Now a married couple enjoying an animated wrangle in a 
first-floor front ; now a servant-maid entertaining a policeman, or a 
Life Guardsman, with a heart's devotion and cold shoulder of mutton, 
in a far-down area ; now a demure maiden lacing her virgin bodice 
before a cracked triangle of a looking-glass, at an attic window ; now 
lords and ladies walking with parasols and lapdogs, and children in 
the private gardens of noble mansions, screened from the inquisitive 
pedestrians by sullen brick walls ; now domestics hanging out the 
clothes in back-yards (seen over the roofs of one-storey houses), 
malicious birds of prey waiting, doubtless, round the corner for the 
fell purpose of pecking off their noses, while the astute King is in his 
counting-house on the second floor counting out his money, and the 
Queen, with the true gentleness of womanhood, is in the front kitchen, 
eating bread and honey in confident security, recking little of the 
four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, or of the song of sixpence 
— or rather of five shillings — which I am this day singing about them 
all, in consideration of an adequate pocketful of rye. So shall you 
look down and see those things ; but chiefly shall you enjoy delecta- 
tion and gather experience from the sight of the men and women who 
are continually passing beneath you in carriages and in cabs ; yea, 
and in carts and barrows. Varied life, troubled life, busy, restless, 
chameleon life. The philosopher may learn much by reading the 
tradesmen's names over the shop-fronts, which — he will never read 
them as he passes along the pavement — will give him quite a new 
insight into nomenclature. But only let him consider the carriages 
and the cabs, and he may learn wisdom in the ways of mankind in 
every rood of ground he traverses. 

Sweethearting in cabs and carriages ; passionate appeals for mercy ; 
men brawling and fighting ; lunatics being borne away to captivity ; 
felons, shackled and manacled to the chin, being taken to jail, and 



SIX P.M. A CHARITY DINNER. 221 

perhaps to death, by stern policemen and jailers ; frantic women 
kneeling on carriage-floors, women with dishevelled hair, streaming 
eyes, clasped hands raised to a Heaven which is never deaf but is 
sometimes stern, a weeping child clinging to their disordered dress, 
and money and jewels cast carelessly on the carriage cushions ; 
gamblers carding and dicing ; knaves drugging fools ; debtors in the 
charge of sheriff's officers; roysterers gone in drink; the " fatal 
accident" on its way to the hospital, lying all bruised and bloody 
across the policeman's knee ; the octogenarian in his last paralytic 
fit, and the mother suckling her first infant. All these dramas on 
four wheels may be seen by him on the top of the omnibus, who 
may, if of a caustic turn, rub his hands, and cry, " Aha ! little do 
you reck that a chiel is above you taking notes, and, faith, that he'll 
print them ! " 

You see, there are some elements of sadness, nay, of deep and 
terrible tragedy, in these vehicular panoramas — the unconscious show- 
vans ; but at Six o' Clock in the Evening the cabs and carriages 
on which you look down offer, mostly, a far pleasanter spectacle. 
They are full of people going out to dinner. Some in broughams, 
coupes, double-bodied carriages, and the occupants of these are ladies 
and gentlemen, attired in the full panoply of evening costume, and 
whom, at the first blush, you might take for members of the highest 
aristocracy. But they are not so. They simply belong to the first- 
class genteel circles, the very superior middle ranks ; the dwellers in 
Lower Belgravia — Brompton, Kensington, and Pimlico ; or in Lesser 
Tyburnia — Bayswater and Notting Hill. They have ail the airs and 
graces, ali the allurements, of the titled and the exclusive ; but they 
have not the genuine Hall-mark of nobility and fashion ; they are but 
Britannia metal, electro-gilt in a very superior maimer. The un- 
deniable Patricians, the satraps of our modern Persian splendour, do 
not dine (would not supper be a more appropriate term?) till half- 
past seven, or even eight, post meridian. They can have, I should 
imagine, but scant appetites for their dinner at that advanced period 
of the evening, unless, indeed, they partake of it in the ancient Roman 
manner, lolling on the triclinium, crowning themselves with flowers, 
and following, between the courses, the swinish examples of Apicius 
and Luculius. Better, I take it, a mutton chop at the Cock, or 
the Cheshire Cheese, than these nasty Ancient Roman repasts. 
It is true our moderns stay their aristocratic stomachs early in the 
afternoon with a copious lunch of hot meats and generous wines ; and 



222 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

they say that her blessed Majesty herself, like a good, sensible woman, 
makes her real dinner at two o'clock, with her little children, in the 
nursery, and takes but a mere bite and sup at the grand stall-fed feast 
of gold plate in the evening. 

fe But there are plenty of good dinners going on at six o'clock in the 
evening, and plenty of good diners-out to attend them. Masters in 
Chancery, who are renowned judges of port-wine, dine at six. Six, for 
half-past, is the dinner-hour for East India Directors. Let us hope 
that their dinners will continue to be as good as of yore, though the 
new India Bill leaves them nothing to direct. Members of Parliament, 
during the session, dine whenever they can, and sometimes not at all; 
but on "no House" days, six o'clock — always taken with a reserva- 
tion for the half-past, for " six o'clock sharp " is entirely gone out of 
fashion, save with Muswell Hill stock-brokers, Manchester Square 
proctors, Bedford Row solicitors, and people who live in Bloomsburia 
— is the great time for them to drop into their clubs, sneer over the 
evening papers, gnash their teeth because there may happen to be no 
leading articles eulogistic or abusive of them therein, and prendre des 
informations, as the French say (though why I could not just as well 
say it in English, save that the cook at the club is a Frenchman, 
puzzles me), about what there may be good for dinner. But I must 
not forget that I am on the top of an omnibus, looking down on the 
people in the broughams and the cabs. Admire that youthful exqui- 
site, curled, and oiled, and scented into a sufficient semblance of the 
" Nineveh Bull," with whom Mr. Tennyson was so angry in " Maud." 
His glossy hair is faultlessly parted down the occiput and down the 
cranium behind White as the fleece of Clarimunda's sheep is his 
body linen. Stiff as the necks of the present generation is his collar. 
Black as Erebus is his evening suit. Shining like mirrors are the little 
varnished tips of his jean-boots. Severe as the late General Picton 
is the tie of his cravat. This gracilis puer is going to dine in Thurlow 
Square, Brompton. That gold-rimmed lorgnon you see screwed into 
his face, to the damaging distortion of his muscles, will not be removed 
therefrom — nor during dinner, nor during wine-taking, nor during the 
evening party which will follow the dinner, nor during the "little 
music," the dancing, the supper, the shawling, the departure, and the 
drive home to his chambers. He will eat in his eyeglass, and drink in 
his eyeglass, and flirt and polk in his eyeglass. I am almost persuaded 
that he will sleep in his eyeglass (I knew a married lady who used to 
sleep in her spectacles, which led to a divorce : she alleged the cause to 



SIX T.M. — A CHARITY DINNEK. 223 

be systematic cruelty, but what will not an enraged woman say?); and 
I should not be in the least surprised if he were to die in his eyeglass, 
and be buried in his eyeglass, and if the epitaph on his gravestone were 
to be " veluti in speculum." 

Down and down again, glance from the omnibus summit, and see 
in that snug 5 circular-fronted brougham, a comfortable couple, trotting 
out to dinner in the Alpha Road, St. John's Wood. Plenty of lobster 
sauce they will have with their salmon, I wager : twice of boiled chicken 
and white sauce they will not refuse, and oyster patties will they freely 
partake of. A jovial couple, rosy, chubby, middle-aged, childless, I 
opine, which makes them a little too partial to table enjoyments. They 
should be well to do in the world, fond of giving merry, corpulent 
little dinners of their own, with carpet dances afterwards, and living, 
I will be bound (our omnibus is ubiquitous, remember) at Maida Hill, 
or Pine Apple Gate. There is another couple, stiff, starched, angular, 
acrimonious-looking. Husband with a stern, Lincoln's Inn convey- 
ancing face> and pilloried in starch, w 7 ith white kid gloves much too 
large for him. Wife, with all manner of tags, and tags, and odds and 
ends of finery fluttering about her : one of those women who, if she 
had all the rich toilettes of all King Solomon's wives on her, would 
never look well dressed. I shouldn't like to dine where they are 
going. I know what the dinner will be like. Prim, pretentious, 
dismal, and eminently uncomfortable. There will be a saddle of mut- 
ton not sufficiently hung, the fish will be cold, the wines hot, and 
the carving-knives will be blunt. After dinner the men will talk 
dreary politics, redolent of stupid Retrogression, and the women will 
talk about physic and the hooping-cough. Yet another couple — 
husband and wife ? A severe swell, with drooping moustaches of im- 
mense length, but which are half whiskers. Transparent deceit ! A 
pretty lady — gauzy bonnet and artificial flowers, muslin jacket, skirts 
and flounces oozing out at the sides of the carriage ; hair a la Eugenie, 
and a Skye terrier with a pink ribbon. I know w^hat this means. 
Greenwich, seven o'clock dinner (they are rather late, by the way, but 
they pass us on London Bridge, and the coachman will drive rapidly) 
water souehe, whitebait, brown bread and butter, and iced punch ; 
cigar on balcony, and contemplation of the moon. Ride on, and be 
happy. Rejoice in your youth — and never mind the rest. It will 
come, young man, whether you mind it or not. 

Hallo ! there he is. I thought so. With a red face, shaven to the 
superlative degree of shininess, with gills white and tremendous, with a 



224 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

noble white waistcoat, and from time to time nervously consulting his 
watch, lest he should be half a minute behind time with the spring soup, 
rides by in a swift Hansom, the old gentleman who is going to a Charity 
Dinner. Blessings on his benevolent, gastronomic old head, he never 
misses one. He is going as quick as double fare will convey him to 
the London Tavern. Quick ! oh thou conductor, let me descend, for I 
must take a Hansom too, and follow my venerable friend to the London 
Tavern ; and, by cock and pye, I will go dine there too. 

I think my readers must be by this time sufficiently acquainted 
with the fact that I am endowed w r ith a very nervous temperament. 
Indeed, were I to say that I start at my own shadow, that I do fear 
each bush an officer, that I am continually in terror of Sudden Death, 
that I w T ould rather not go upstairs in the dark, and that (which is not 
at all incompatible with a nervous organisation) in circumstances of 
real moment, in imminent life-peril, in a storm, in a balloon, in a 
tumult, and in a pestilence, I am perfectly master of myself, and, with 
a complete Trust and Reliance, am quite contented and happy in my 
mind : when I state this, I don't think I need blush to own that I am 
as mortally afraid now r of the boys in the street as in the old days when 
they pelted me with sharp stones because I preferred going to school 
quietly instead of playing fly-the-garter in the gutter. I am afraid of 
my last schoolmaster (he is quite bankrupt and broken, and pays me 
visits to borrow small silver occasionally), and yet call him reveren- 
tially, " Sir." I am afraid of ladies — not of the married ones, in w T hom 
I take great delight, talking Buehan's " Medicine," Acton's " Cookery," 
and Mrs. Ellis with them, very gravely, till they think me a harmless 
fogey, hopelessly celibate, but sensible; not of the innocent young 
girls, with their charming naivete and pretty sauciness ; but of the 
" young ladies," who are " out," and play the piano, and sing Italian 
songs — of which, Lord bless them ! they know no more than I do of 
crochet-work — and who fling themselves, their accomplishments, and 
their low-necked dresses, at men's heads. I am afraid of policemen, 
lest in an evanescent fit of ill temper they should take me up, and 
with their facile notions of the obligations of an oath, swear that I was 
lurking about with intent to commit a felon ; and, transcendentally, I 
am afraid of w r aiters. I watch them — him— the Waiter, with great 
awe and trembling. Does he know, I ask myself, as he fills my tum- 
bler with iced champagne, that half-and-half is a liquid to which I am 
more accustomed ? Does he know that, sumptuously as I dine to-day, 
I didn't dine at all yesterday ? Is he aware that Mr. Threadpaper is 



SIX P. 31. A CHARITY DINNER. 22-5 

dunning me for that dress-coat with the watered-silk facings : Can 
he see under the table that the soles of my boots are no better than 
they should be ? Is it within his cognizance that I have not come to 
the Albion, or the London Tavern, or the Freemasons', as a guest, but 
simply to report the dinner for the " Morning Meteor?" Does he 
consider the shilling I give him as insufficient ? Shilling ! He has 
many more shillings than I have, I trow. He pulls four pounds in 
silver from his pocket to change one a crown-piece. To-day he is 
Charles or James ; but to-morrow he will be the proprietor of a mag- 
nificent West-end restaurant, rivalling Messrs. Simpson and Dawes at 
the Divan, or Mr. Sawyer at the London. So I am respectful to the 
waiter, and fee him largely but fearfully ; and, were it not that he 
might take me for a waiter in disguise, I would also call him " Sir." 

I no sooner arrive at the London Tavern, pari passu with the old 
gentleman with the gills and the white neckcloth, than I feel myself 
delivered over to the thraldom of waiterdom. An urbane creature, 
who might pass for a Puseyite curate, were not the waitorial stigmata 
unmistakeably imprinted on him, meets me, and tells me in an olea- 
ginous undertone, which is like clear turtle-soup, that the Anniversary 
Festival of the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs is on the second 
floor to the right. A second waiter meets me at the foot of the stair- 
case, and whispers discreetly behind the back of his hand, " Two 
storeys higher, sir." A third waylays me benevolently on the first- 
floor landing, and mildly ravishes from me my hat and stick, in return 
for which he gives me a cheque much larger than my dinner ticket ; 
which last is taken from me on the second floor by a beaming spirit, 
the bows of whose cravat are like wings, and who hands me to a Dread 
Presence — a stout, severe man with a gray head, who is in truth 
the head- waiter at this Anniversary Festival, and who with a solemn 
ceremony inducts me into the reception-room. 

Here, in a somewhat faded, but intensely respectable-looking apart- 
ment, I find about fifty people I don't know from Adam, and who 
are yet all brothers or uncles or cousins-german, at the least, of my 
rubicund white-waistcoated friend. And. to tell the truth, I don't 
know him personally, though his face, from meeting him at innumer- 
able festivals, is perfectly familiar to me. So are those of the other 
fifty strangers. I have heard all their names, and all about them; 
but one is not expected to remember these things at public dinners. 
You take wine with your next neighbour ; sometimes converse with 
him about eating and drinking, the merits of the charity, the late 



226 TWICE ROUND IKS CLOCK, 

political tergiversation of the chairman, the heat of the weather, the 
fine voice of Mr. Lockey, and the pretty face of Miss Hansford, and 
there an end. Your interlocutor may be to-morrow the lawyer who 
sues you, the author whose book you w r ill slaughter in a review, the 
Commissioner of Insolvency w 7 ho may send you back for eighteen 
months. To have met a man at a public dinner is about as valid a 
claim to the possession of his acquaintance, as to have met him in the 
Kursaal at Hombourg, or on the steps of the St. Nicholas Hotel at New 
York. After some twenty years of public dining together, it is not, I 
believe, considered a gross breach of etiquette to make the gentleman 
who has been so frequently your fellow convive a very distant bow 
should you meet him in the street ; but even this is thought to be a 
freedom by some rigid sticklers for decorum. 

In genteel society, the half hour before dinner is generally accepted 
as a time of unlimited boredom and social frigidity, but there you have 
the relief, if not relaxation, of staring the guests out of countenance, 
making out a mental list of the people you would not like to take wine 
with, and turning over the leaves of the melancholy old albums, every 
page of w T hich you have" conned a hundred times before. But in the 
half hour (and it frequently is a whole one) before a public dinner, 
you have no albums or scrapbooks to dog's-ear. There is no use in 
staring at your neighbours : the types of character are so similar — big 
and crimsoned sensuous faces looming over white waistcoats, with a 
plentiful sprinkling among them of the clerical element. You can't 
smoke, you can't (that is, I daren't) order sherry and bitters. If you 
look out of the window, you see nothing but chimney pots, leads, and 
skylights, with a stray vagrant cat outrunning the constable over them: 
and the best thing you can do is to bring an amusing duodecimo with 
you, or betake yourself to one of the settles, and twiddle your thumbs 
till dinner-time. But, joy, joy, here are quails in the conversational 
famine ; here is a welling spring in the wilderness. The door opens, 
and the sonorous voice of the head-waiter announces The Chairman. 

Very probably he is a lord. A philanthropic peer, always ready 
and willing to do a kind turn for anybody, and to the fore with his 
chairmanship, his set speeches, and his fifty-pound note for "fatuous 
monomaniacs," " intellectual good-for-nothings," or " decayed bailiffs." 
He may be a regular dining-out lord, a not very rich nobleman, who 
has grown gray in taking the chair at charity dinners, and who is not 
expected to give anything to the institution save the powerful weight 
of his presence and influence. He may be a young lord, fresh caught, 



SIX P.M. — A CHAHITY DINNER. 227 

generously eager (as are, I am rejoiced to say, the majority of our 
young lords now-a-days) to vindicate the power and willingness for 
usefulness of his order ; striving to show that there is not so much dif- 
ference between his coronet and the Phrygian cap, save that one is 
made of velvet and the other of red worsted (ah ! that irreconcileable 
red worsted), very impulsive, very imprudent, sometimes slightly im- 
becile, but full of good intentions and honest aspirations ; or he may be 
a member of Parliament, a veteran of the back benches, burning to 
make up for his silence in the House by his eloquence in the forum of 
a tavern dinner. He may be a worthy banker or merchant, who gets 
through the speech-making before him in a business-like manner, and 
does not allow it in the least to interfere with the consumption of his 
proper quantum of wine ; or he may be, as is very frequently the case, 
a lion- — the " great gun " — the last blast of Fame's trumpet for the 
hour : a lawyer, a traveller a philosopher, or an author, whom the 
managing committee have secured, just as the manager of a theatre 
would secure a dwarf, a giant, a w T ild beast tamer, a blind piper, or a 
sword swallower, to enhance the receipts of the exhibition. 

About thirty of the fifty people I don't know from Adam gather 
immediately in a circle round the chairman. The few who have the 
honour to be on speaking terms with him jostle him sociably, and 
shake hands with him with a rueful expression of contentment. Those 
who don't know him rub their hands violently, breathe hard, stare 
fixedly at him, and whisper to one another that he is very like his 
portrait, or that he isn't at all like his portrait, or that he is getting 
old, or that he looks remarkably young, or some equally relevant 
banalities. The remaining twenty guests gather in the window-bays, 
and stare at nothing particular, or else read the printed prospectus of 
the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs, and wonder how many of the 
fine list of stewards announced may be present on the occasion. As 
for the chairman, he takes up a position with his back safely glued (so 
it seems) to the mantelpiece, and preserves a dignified equanimity, 
working his head from side to side in his white neckcloth like that 
waxen effigy of Mr. Cobbett, late M.P. for Oldham, which terrifies 
country cousins by its vitality of appearance (those drab smallclothes 
and gaiters were a great stroke of genius) at Madame Tussaud's. 

By this time a crowd of more people you don't know from Adam, 
and often outnumbering the fifty in the w T aiting-room, have gathered 
on the staircase, the landing, and have even invaded the precincts of 
the dining saloon, where they potter about the tables, peeping for the 



228 TWICE 110TJXD THE CLOCK. 

napkins which may contain the special cards bearing their name and 
denoting their place at the banquet. These are the people who do 
know one another ; these are the stewards, patrons of the charity, or 
gentlemen connected w r ith its administration. They are all in a very 
excellent temper, as men need be who are about to partake of a capital 
dinner and a skinful of wine, and they crack those special jokes, and 
tell those special funny stories, which you hear nowhere save at a 
public dinner. Then, at the door, you see a detachment of waiters, 
bearing fasces of long, blue staves, tipped with brass, which they dis- 
tribute to sundry inoffensive gentlemen, whose real attributes are at 
once discovered, and who are patent to the dining-out world as 
Stewards. They take the staves, looking very much ashamed of them ; 
and, bearing besides a quaint resemblance to undertakers out for a 
holiday, and in a procession, which would be solemn if it wasn't funny, 
precede the chairman to his place of honour. 

The tables form three sides of an oblong quadrangle : sometimes the 
horse-shoe form is adopted. In the midst, in a line with the chair- 
man, and as close to his august presence as is practicable, is a table of 
some ten or a dozen converts, devoted to some modestly-attired gentle- 
men (some of them not in evening costume at all), whose particular 
places are all assigned to them ; who for a wonder seem on most in- 
timate terms mutually, and take wine frequently with one another; who 
are waited upon with the most sedulous attention, and have the very 
best on the table, both in the way of liquids and solids, at their dis- 
posal. They apply themselves to the consumption of these delicacies 
with great diligence and cheerfulness : but they do not seem quite suf- 
ficiently impressed with the commanding merits of the Royal Asylum 
for Fatuous Monomaniacs. I wonder what special business brings 
these gentlemen hither. At some distance from this table, towards the 
door, but still in a line with the chairman, you see a pianoforte, and a 
couple of music-stands ; partially concealed behind a crimson baize 
screen, beneath the gallery at the end, sit some stalwart individuals, of 
martial appearance, and superbly attired in scarlet and gold lace, whom 
you might easily, at first, mistake for staff officers, but whom their 
brass trombones and ophicleides speedily proclaim to be members of the 
band of one of the regiments of Guards. And high above all, sup- 
ported on the sham scagliola Corinthian columns, with the gilt capitals, 
is a trellised balcony, full of ladies in full evening dress. What on 
earth those dear creatures want at such gatherings, — what pleasure 
they can derive from the spectacle of their husbands and friends over- 



SIX P.M. — A CHARITY DINNER. 



229 




230 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

eating and sometimes over-drinking themselves, or from the audition 
of stupid speeches, passes my comprehension. There they are, how- 
ever, giggling, fluttering, waving tiny pocket-handkerchiefs, and striv- 
ing to mitigate the meaty miasma of the place by nasal applications 
to their bouquets or their essence bottles ; and there they will be, I 
presume, till public dinners go out of fashion altogether.* 

I do not think I am called upon to give the bill of fare of a public 
dinner. I have no desire to edit the next republication of Ude, or 
Doctor Kitchener, Soyer, or Francatelli ; besides, I could only make 
your and my mouth water by expatiating on the rich viands and wines 
which "mine host" (he is always mine host) of the Albion, the 
London Tavern, or the Freemasons', provides for a guinea a-head. 
You remember what I told you the friend with the face like an over- 
ripe fig said of public dinners — that they were the sublimation of 
superfluities ; and, indeed, if such a repast be not one of those in which 
a man is called upon to eat Italian trout, Dutch dory, Glo'ster salmon, 
quails and madeira, Cherbourg pea-chicks, Russian artichokes, Mace- 
donian jellies, Charlottes of a thousand fruits, Richelieu puddings, 
vanilla creams, Toulouse leverets, iced punch, hock, champagne, claret, 
moselle and burgundy, port, sherry, kirschwasser, and pale brandy, I 
don't know the meaning of the word superfluity at all. 

Some three hours after the company have sate down to dinner ; 
after the "usual loyal and constitutional toasts," with the usual musical 
honours ; after the toast of the evening — " Prosperity to the Royal 
Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs" — with its accompanying (more 
or less) eloquent speech from the noble or distinguished chairman, 
beseeching liberal pecuniary support for so deserving an institution ; 
after the prompt and generous response, in the way of cheques and 
guineas, from the guests ; after a tedious programme of glees and 
ballads has been got through, and the chairman has discreetly vanished 
to his carriage ; after the inveterate diners-out, who ivill tarry long at 
the wine, have received one or two gentle hints that coffee awaits their 
acceptance in an adjoining apartment; and about the time that the 
feast begins to wear a somewhat bleared and faded aspect (the lights 
cannot grow pale till they are turned off, for these are of the Gas Com- 
pany's providing), the waiters slouch about with wooden trays, full of 
ruined dessert-plates, cracked nuts, muddy decanters, and half- emptied 

* The ladies appear in the gallery "before dinner, quit it after grace has been 
said, and are regaled in ante-chambers "with ices, coffee, and champagne. They 
return when the speech-making, wine-bibbing, and song-singing commence. 



six P.M. A CHARITY DIN NEK. 231 

glasses ; cherry stalks, strawberry stems, squeezed oranges, the ex- 
pressed skins of grapes, litter the tables ; chairs are standing at all 
sorts of eccentric angles ; and crumpled and twisted napkins are thrown 
pell-mell about. There is an end to the fine feast : the cates are eaten, 
the wine drunk. Lazarus the beggar might have taken his rags out of 
pawn (had he indeed any such rags to mortgage), and his thin-limbed 
little brats might have grown plump and rosy on a tithe of the money 
that has been wasted this night in guttling and guzzling, Wasted ? 
Oh ! say not wasted, Cynic ; take the mote from thine own eye. 
Grumbler, for shame ! I have done ill, I think, to caricature the name 
even of any public charity. Let the " Fatuous Monomaniacs " be 
numbered with the rest of my exploded fantastic conceits. Let this 
rather be remembered : that the tavern feast of superfluities is prolific 
in generous and glorious results ; that from this seemingly gross and 
sensual gathering spring charity, love, mercy, and benevolence. 
Pardon the rich dinners and rare wines ; look over the excess in 
animal enjoyments ; forgive even the prosy speeches ; for the plate has 
gone round. To-morrow Lazarus shall rejoice in his rags, and blind 
Tobias shall lift up his hands for gratitude ; the voice in Eama shall 
be bushed and Rachel shall weep no more ; and all because these good 
gentlemen with the rosy faces and the white waistcoats have dined so 
well. For these dinners are for the benefit of the sick and the infirm, 
the lunatic and the imbecile, the widow and the orphan, the decayed 
artist and the reduced gentlewoman, the lame, the halt, the blind, the 
poor harlot and the penitent thief, and they shall have their part in 
these abundant loaves and fishes ; and the sublimation of superfluities 
must be condoned for the sake of those voluntary contributions which 
are the noblest support of the noble charities in England. Remember 
the story of the Pot of Ointment. These superfluities yield a better 
surplus than though the spikenard was sold for an hundred-pence and 
given to the poor. 

A very cream of waiters has taken good care of me during the 
evening. He now fetches me my walking gear, and as he pockets my 
modest "largesse," whispers confidentially that he has had the honour 
of " seeing me afore ; " and, blushing, I remember that I have met him 
at private parties. It is well for me if I can slip downstairs quietly, 
hail a cab, and drive to one of the operas ; for an act of the " Trova- 
tore " or " Lucrezia Borgia " are, in my opinion, far better than Seltzer 
water in restoring the balance of one's mind after an arduous public 
dinner. But it oft-times happens that a man in your memorialist's 



232 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

position has to pass a quart cPheure de Rabelais, worse than paying the 
bill, after one of these festive meetings. For, in a roomy apartment 
downstairs, lighted by waxen tapers, such things as pens, ink, and 
paper, coffee, cognac, and cigars, are, by the forethought of the liberal 
proprietors of the establishment, laid out for the benefit of those merry 
gentlemen you saw upstairs at the small table in a line with the chair- 
man, where they were so well taken care of; and if circumstances 
compel me to be in a merry mood to-night, I must hie me into this 
roomy chamber, and scribble a column or so of " copy " about the 
dinner, which will appear to-morrow morning in the " Meteor." 
Rubbing my eyes as I glance over the damp sheet between my own 
warm ones in bed, I wonder who ever could have written the report of 
all those elegant speeches. It seems at least a year since I dined with 
the " Fatuous Monomanaics." 

This is again six o'clock p.m., but not by any means on the same 
evening. The occasion could have no possible connection with going 
out to dinner, for it happens to be six o'clock " sharp:" and, more- 
over, it is on Friday, a day on which it is supposed to be as unlucky 
to go out to dinner as to go to sea, to marry, to put on a new coat, to 
commence a new novel, to cut your nails, or buy tripe. Now, what 
can I be doing in the city on this Friday evening ? Certainly not to 
perform any of the operations alluded to above. Scarcely on business. 
Bank, Exchange, wharfs, Custom-house, money-market, merchants' 
counting-houses, are all closed, and the inner city, the narrow winding 
lanes, that almost smell of money, are deserted. What am I doing so 
close to St. Paul's Cathedral, and why do I turn off by St. Martin's- 
le-Grand ? For the simple reason, that Friday evening is the very 
best one in the seven to witness the spectacle I am going to see — 
Newspaper Fair at the General Post Office. 

In the vast vestibule, or hall, of the establishment so admirably 
presided over by Mr. Rowland Hill (for I do not reckon the aristo- 
cratic placeman who is, turn and turn about, Whig or Tory, its 
nominal chief, for much), and whose fostering care has made it (with 
some slight occasional shortcomings) the best-managed and most 
efficient national institution in Europe, you may observe, in the left- 
hand corner from the peristyle, and opposite the secretary's office 
(tremendous " counts " are the clerks in the secretary's office, jaunty 
bureaucrats, who ride upon park hacks, and are "come for" by 
ringlets in broughams at closing time, but who get through their 



THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE. 233 




234 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

work in about half the time it would take the ordinary slaves of the 
desk, simply because their shrewdness and knowledge of the world 
enables them to " see through a case " before the average man of 
tape and quill can make up his mind to docket a letter) a huge longi- 
tudinal slit in the panelling above, on which is the inscription " For 
newspapers only." And all day long, newspapers only, stringed or 
labelled, are thrust into this incision ; and the typographed lucubra- 
tions of the some five hundred men who, for salaries ranging from 
twenty shillings to twenty pounds per week, have to think, and some- 
times almost feel, in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for some sixty millions 
of people (I say nothing of the re-actionary influence upon foreign 
nations), go forth to the uttermost ends of the earth. But as six 
o'clock approaches (and six o'clock sharp is the irrevocable closing 
time for the departure of newspapers by the current night's mail), 
they open a tall w T indow above, and the newspapers are no more 
thrust, but flung in. 

It is on this congenial ground that I meet those juvenile friends 
to whom I introduced a large circle of acquaintances, even in the 
second hour of "Twice Round the Clock" — I mean the newspaper 
boys. In another page I said, jestingly, that I was afraid of boys. 
I must except from the category the newspaper boys. I have been 
sadly harassed and teazed by them in their out-of-door or bagful 
state, when they go round to purchase newspapers : for I once hap- 
pened to be editor of a cheap journal, at whose office there was no 
editor's room. I was compelled, occasionally, to read my proofs be- 
hind the counter, in the presence of the publisher and his assistant, 
and I have endured much mental pain and suffering from the some- 
what too demonstrative facetice of the young gentlemen engaged in 
the a trade." Verbal satire of the most acutely personal nature was 
their ordinary mode of procedure ; but, occasionally, when the pub- 
lication (as sometimes happened) was late in its appearance, their 
playfulness w r as aggravated to the extent of casting an old shoe at me, 
and on one signal occasion a bag of flour. Still the newspaper boy is 
the twin-brother of the printer's devil ; and, much as I have seen of 
those patient, willing little urchins, I should be a brute if I were hard 
to them, here. 

The newspaper boys are, of course, in immense array at the six 
o'clock fair on Friday evening. They are varied, as currants are by 
sultanas in a dumpling, by newspaper men, who, where the boys 
struggle up to the window and drop in their load, boldly fling bags 



SEVEN P.M. — A THEATRICAL GREEN-BOOM. 235 

full, sacks full, of journals into the yawning casement. There is a 
legend that they once threw a boy into the window, newspapers and 
all. But at six o'clock everything is over — the window is closed — 
and newspaper fair is adjourned to the next Friday. 



SEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.— A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM, 
AND "BEHIND THE SCENES." 

Deah friends and readers, we are approaching the sere and yellow 
leaf of our peregrinations "round the clock." As the year wanes, as 
golden August points to the culminating glories of the year, but with 
oft-times a dark and impetuous storm presaging the evil days of winter 
that are to come, so I feel, hour after hour, that our (to me) pleasant 
intercommunications are destined to cease. You have been very for- 
bearing with me, have suppressed a justifiable petulance at my short- 
comings, my digressions, my wayward fancies and prejudices, because 
you know (I hope and trust) that I am always your faithful servant 
and willing scribe, that (errors excepted, as the lawyers say) I have 
but one aim and end in these papers — to tell you the truth about 
London, its life and manners ; to describe what I have seen, to tell 
you what I know ; and to place before you, very timidly and under all 
correction, certain things which, in my opinion, it behoves you, and 
all who have a faith in the better part of humanity, to think about. 
Indeed, it is a very great privilege for a writer to be placed face to 
face with a hundred thousand critics every week, in lieu of half a 
hundred every half-year or so. He is flouted, and jeered, and scouted, 
and scolded, and remonstrated with, every time the penny post comes 
in ; but he makes friends every week. He knows that his words are 
winged ; he knows that he appeals to men who will understand his 
views, and to women who will sympathise with him ; and though he 
may be as a pedlar, carrying about petty wares — ribbons, and tags, 
and small jewellery, and soap, and. sweetstufT — he is vain enough to 
imagine that he can carry cheerfulness and content into many house- 



236 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

holds ; and that in speaking our common language of hopes and fears, 
likes and dislikes, he does not belie his cognomen of a " Welcome 
Guest." If he — if I — thought otherwise, I would tear this sheet, sell 
my reversion, buy an annuity of £20 a year, and join the convent of 
La Trappe, to wear a cowl, sing matins and complins, eat black 
radishes, and dig my own grave, to-morrow. 

Seven o'clock post meridian has brought us at least the artificial 
abnegation of daylight, and has subjected us to the regime of gaslight. 
You had a twinkle of that unwholesome vapour, under the head of 
public dinners ; but henceforth Sol will shine no longer on our labours. 
It is seven o'clock in the evening, and we are going to the play. 

When I state that the subjects of this article are a Theatrical 
Green-Room, and " Behind the Scenes," I anticipate some amount of 
intellectual commotion among the younger, and especially the "fast" 
portion, of my readers. Jaunty young clerks, and incipient men about 
town, dwelling in decorous country boroughs, will be apt to fancy 
that I am about to launch into a deliriously exciting account of those 
charmed regions which lie beyond the stage-door ; that my talk will 
be altogether of spangles, muslin, skirts, and pink tights. Nay, even 
my young lady readers may deceive themselves with the idea that I 
shall draw a glowing picture of the dangerous, delightful creatures 
who flutter every night before theatrical audiences, and of the dear, 
naughty, wicked, darling marquises, earls, and baronets who lounge 
behind the scens. Helas ! il rfen est rien. I know r all about green- 
rooms, wings, and prompt-boxes. I have been in the artistes' foyer 
of the Grand Opera, in the flies of her Majesty's, and in the mezza- 
nine floor of the Princess's. I am not about to be cynical, but I must 
be prosaic, and mean to tell you, in a matter-of-fact way, what the 
green-room and behind the scenes of a London theatre are like at 
seven o'clock. 

It is strange, though, what a fascination these forbidden regions 
exercise over the uninitiated. I never knew any one yet who w r as 
actuated by an inordinate desire to visit the vestry-room of a church, 
or to see the cupboard where the rector and curate's surplices are 
suspended on pegs, or where the sacramental wine is kept. It is 
but seldom that I have seen anybody who evinced a particular cu- 
riosity to see a pawnbroker's w r are-room, at the top of the spout, or 
to become acquainted with the arcana of a butcher's slaughter-house 
(though I must confess, myself, to having once, as a schoolboy, sub- 
scribed fourpence, in company with about ten others, to see a bullock 



SEVEN P.M. — A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM. 237* 

killed) — yet everybody wants to go "behind the scenes." Some 
twenty months since, I had business to settle with a firm of solicitors, 
haughty, precise, distant, and sternly business-like, who dwelt in Bed- 
ford Row. I think that some one who was a client of the firm had a 
judgment against me, to which was witness one Frederick Pollock, at 
Westminster ; but let that pass. I settled the matter, and thought 
myself well out of the firm and its clutches, when the penultimate 
junior partner, a middle-aged, respectable man, with a prematurely- 
bald head, asked me to dinner at Verrey's. He was good enough to 
allow me to order the repast, and politely deferred to my preference 
for Macon vieux over hot sherry ; but, towards the cheese, he hinted 
that a man of the world, such as I seemed to be, ought never to be in 
difficulties (I have been hopelessly insolvent since the year '27, in 
which I was born), and that he would esteem it a very great favour if 
I would take him " behind the scenes" some night. Yes; this man 
of tape and quill, of green ferret and pounce, of sheepskins and abomi- 
nable processes, positively wanted to see the Eleusinian mysteries of 
the interior of a London theatre. I showed them to him, and he is 
grateful still. I meet him occasionally at places of public resort. He 
is next to senior partner now, but he never hints at six-and-eightpence 
when I ask a legal question ; and his most valuable act of friendship 
is this, that whenever the Sheriff of Middlesex is moved to run up 
and down in his bailiwick, with a special reference to my disparage- 
ment, I receive a mysterious message, generally conveyed by a bat- 
tered individual, who wipes his face on the sleeve of his coat, and is 
not averse to taking " something short," that there is " something 
out" against me, and that I had better look sharp. Whereupon I 
look out as sharp as I can for the most convenient tenth milestone out 
of Babylon. 

Now, friend and fellow-traveller of mine, do you mind transforming 
yourself for the nonce into the friendly solicitor, and coming with me 
" behind the scenes?" I know that with these continual metamor- 
phoses I am making a very golden ass of Apuleius of you ; but it is all, 
believe me, for your benefit. I don't want you to stand a dinner at 
Verrey's. I only want you to put on the slippers of patience and the 
spectacles of observation, and to follow me. 

There is, the moralist hath said, a time for all things, and that much 
libelled institution, a theatre, has among its Bohemian faults of reck- 
lessness and improvidence, the somewhat rare virtue of punctuality. 
Even those events of its daily life which depend for the extent of their 



238 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

duration upon adventitious circumstances, are marked by a remarkably 
well-kept average. Theatrical rehearsals generally commence at ten 
o'clock in the morning ; and though it will sometimes happen, in the 
case of new pieces about to be produced— especially pantomimes and 
spectacles, that the rehearsal is prolonged to within a few minutes of 
the rising of the curtain for the evening performance, the usual turning 
of an ordinary rehearsal's, or series of rehearsals' lane, is four o'clock 
p.m. Then the repetiteur in the orchestra shuts up his fiddle in its 
case, and goes home to his tea. Then the young ladies of the corps de 
ballet, who have been indulging in saltatory movements for the last few 
hours, lay aside their " practising dresses"— generally frocks of ordi- 
nary material, cut short in the manner immortalised by that notable 
pedlar, Mr. Stout, in his felonious transaction with the little old woman 
who fell asleep by the king's highway — and subside into the long- 
flounced garments of common life, which are to be again replaced so 
soon as seven o'clock comes, by the abridged muslin skirts and flesh- 
coloured continuations of ballet-girlhood. The principal actresses and 
actors betake themselves to dinner, or to a walk in the park, or give 
themselves a finishing touch of study in the parts they are not yet 
quite perfect in, or, it may be, mount the steep theatrical stairs to the 
mountainous regions where dwell the theatrical tailor and tailoress — 
I entreat them to excuse me, the costumier and the mistress of the 
robes — with whom they confer on the weighty subject of the dresses 
which they are to wear that evening. The carpenters abandon work ; 
the scene-shifters, whose generic name in technical theatrical parlance 
is "labourers," moon about the back part of the stage, seeing that the 
stock of scenery for the evening is all provided, the grooves duly 
blackleaded and the traps greased, and all the " sinks" and " flies," 
ropes and pulleys, and other theatrical gear and tackle, in due working 
order. For, you see, if these little matters be not rigidly and minutely 
attended to, if a rope be out of its place or a screw not rightly home, 
such trifling accidents as mutilation and loss of life are not unlikely to 
happen. That the occurrence of such casualties is of so extreme a 
rarity may be ascribed, I think, to the microscopic care and attention 
which these maligned theatrical people bestow on every inch of their 
domain behind the scenes. They have to work in semi- darkness, and 
under many other circumstances of equal disadvantage ; but, next to a 
fire-engine station and the 'tween decks of a man-o'-war, I do not think 
that I can call to mind a more orderly, better-disciplined, better-tended 
place than that part of a theatre which lies behind the foot-lights. 



SEVE>7 P. 31. — A THEATRICAL GBEEN-BOOM. 239 

Xow, mouse-like, from undiscovered holes, patter softly mysterious 
females in tumbled mob- caps and battered bonnets, who, by the way, 
have been pottering stealthily with brooms and brushes about the pit 
and boxes in the morning, disappearing towards noon. They proceed 
to disencumber the front of the house of the winding-sheets of brown 
holland in which it has been swathed since last midnight. These are 
the " cleaners," and when they have made the house clean and tidy for 
the audience of the evening, dusted the fautcuils, and swept the lobbies, 
they hie them behind the scenes, see that the proper provision of soap 
and towels exists in the dressing-rooms, perhaps lend a hand to the 
scene-shifters, who are completing their afternoon's labour by scientifi- 
cally irrigating the stage with watering-pots; or, if a tragedy is to be 
performed, spreading the green baize extending to the foot-lights— that 
incomprehensible green baize — that field vert on which Paris dies com- 
batant, and Hamlet lies rampant, and without whose presence it is con- 
sidered by many dramatic sages no tragedy could possibly be enacted.* 
Meanwhile, the property-man has brought to the verge of the wings, 
or laid out in trays and hampers, ready to be conveyed below by his 
assistants, the necessary paraphernalia and appurtenances for the 
pieces in that night's bill. Shylock's knife and scales, Ophelia's 
coffin, Claude Melnott's easel and maulstick, Long Tom Coffin's mob- 
cap ; the sham money, sham words, sham eatables and drinkables of 
this unreal and fantastic world, are all prepared. Presently the myr- 
midons of the wardrobe will take the required costumes from their 
frowning presses, and convey them to the dressing-rooms, ready for 
the histrionics who are to wear them. High up above all, above ceil- 
ing, and flies, and chandelier, in his lofty skylighted studio, the scene- 
painter throws down his " double-tie" brush, bids his colour- grinder 
clean his boots, indulges in a mighty wash, and dresses himself for the 
outward world. He improves marvellously by the change. But ten 
minutes since he was an almost indescribable scarecrow, in a tattered 
suit of canvas and list slippers, and bespattered from head to foot with 
dabs of colour. And now he turns out a trim gentleman, with a watch- 
chain, a moustache, an eye-glass, and kid gloves, and he walks off as 
gingerly to the artistic or literary club to which he may belong, as 
though he had never heard of size or whitewash in his life, 

* This absurd remnant of a candle- snuffing age, and wMch is about as con- 
sistent with dramatic proprieties as the performance of the character of Macbeth 
by Garrick in the costume of a Captain in the Guards, was abolished — so far as 
his admirable Shakspearian revivals were concerned — by Mr. Charles Kean. 



240 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

By five o'clock the little industries that have prevailed since the 
rehearsal ended are mostly completed ; and the theatre becomes quite 
still. It is a complete, a solemn, almost an awful stillness. All the 
busy life and cheerful murmur of this human ant-hill are hushed. 
The rows of seats are as deserted as the degrees of some old ruined 
amphitheatre in Rome. The stage is a desert. The " flies" and 
" borders" loom overhead in cobweb indistinctness. Afar off the 
dusky, feeble chandelier, looks like a moon on which no sun con- 
descends to shine ; and were it not for one ray of golden afternoon 
sunlight, that from a topmost window shines obliquely through the 
vast dimness, and rescues the kettle-drums in the orchestra from tene- 
brose oblivion, you might fancy this place, which two hours hence 
will be brilliantly lighted up, full of gorgeous decorations and blithe- 
some music, and a gay audience shouting applause to mimes and 
jesters and painted bayaderes, chasing the golden hours with frolic 
feet — you might fancy the deserted theatre to be a Valley of Dry 
Bones. 

Only two functionaries are ever watchful, and do not entertain the 
slightest thought, either of suspending their vigilance, or of leaving 
the theatre. At the entrance, in his crabbed little watch-box by the 
stage-door, the grim man in the fur cap, who acts as Cerberus to the 
establishment, sits among keys and letters for delivery. Of a multi- 
farious nature is the correspondence at a stage-door. There are 
County Court summonses, seductive offers from rival managers to 
the popular tragedian of the day, pressing entreaties for orders, pink 
three-cornered notes scented and sealed with crests for the premiere 
danseuse, frequently accompanied by pinned-up cornets of tissue-paper 
containing choice bouquets from Covent Garden. There are five-act 
tragedies, and farces, written on official paper for the manager ; soli- 
citations for engagements, cards, bills, and applications for benefit 
tickets. But the grim man at the stage-door takes no heed of them, 
save to deliver them to their proper addresses. He takes no heed 
either (apparently) of the crowds of people, male and female, who 
pass and repass him by night and by day, from Monday till Saturday. 
But he knows them all well, be assured; knows them as well as 
Charon, knows them as well as Cerberus, knows them as well as the 
turnkey of the "lock" in a debtor's prison. Scene-shifter or popular 
tragedian, it is all one to him. He has but to obey his consigne to let 
no one pass his keyed and lettered den who is not connected with the 
theatre, or who has not the entree behind the scenes by special mana- 



SEVEN P.M. A THEATRICAL GREEN-BOOM. 211 

gerial permission ; and in adhering to that, he is as inflexible as 
Death. And while he guards the portal, Manager Doldrum sits in 
his easy-chair in his manuscript-littered private room upstairs. The 
rehearsal may be over, but still he has work to do. He has always 
work to do. Perhaps he anticipates a thin house to-night, and is 
busy scribbling orders which his messenger will take care shall per- 
meate through channels which shall do the house no harm. Or he 
may be glancing over a new farce which one of the accredited authors 
of the theatre has just sent in, and with black-lead pencil suggesting 
excisions, additions, or alterations. Or perhaps he tears his hair and 
gnashes his teeth in dignified privacy, thinking with despair upon the 
blank receipts of the foregone week, murmuring to himself, " Shall I 
close ! shall I close ?" as a badgered and belated Minister of State 
might ask himself, " Shall I resign ?" 

I wonder how many people there are who see the manager airing 
his white waistcoat in his especial stage-box, or envy him as he drives 
away from the theatre in his brougham, or joyfully takes his cheque 
on Ransom's for that last u stunning" and " screaming" new farce that 
forty pounds were given for, and that ran four nights ; I wonder how 
many of these outsiders of the theatrical arcana know what a perse- 
cuted, hunted dog, a genteel galley-slave, a well- dressed Russian serf, 
is the theatrical manager. He may well be coarse and brusque in his 
manners, captious and pettish in conversation, remiss in answering 
letters, averse to parting with ready money for manuscripts which are 
often never acted, and more often never read. Do you know the life 
he leads ? Mr. Pope's existence at Twickenham (or Twitnam), about 
the period when he instructed " good John/' his man, to say that he 
was sick, or dead, was a combination of halcyon days compared to the 
life of a theatrical manager. Are there sons " destined their fathers' 
souls to cross," who " pen a stanza when they should engross ?" are 
there men with harum-scarum lunatic projects, with tomfool notions 
that they are tragedians, with tragedies and farces, to estimate whose 
real value one should make a handsome deduction for the injury done 
to the paper on which they are written? are there madcap young 
ladies, newly-whipped at boarding-school, who fancy that they have 
the vocal powers of Grisi or Bosio, or the tragic acquirements of 
Ellen Tree or Helen Faucit (excuse the Kean and Martin marital pre- 
fixes : the old names are so pleasant) ? are there mad mothers who 
vehemently insist that their skimping daughters can dance like Rosati 
or Pocchini ? are there " guardians," in other words the proprietary 



242 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

slaveholders of dwarfs and contorsionists, precocious pianists, and 
female violoncellists ? are there schemers, knaves, Yankee speculators, 
foreign farmers of singers with cracked voices, bores or insipid idlers — 
they all besiege the theatrical manager, supplicate, cajole, annoy, or 
threaten him. If he doesn't at once accede to their exorbitant terms, 
they forthwith abuse him scurrilously out of doors. He is a robber, an 
impostor, a miser, a Jew. He has been transported. He is insolvent. 
He came out ten years since in the provinces, and in light comedy, and 
failed. He beats his wife. He was the ruin, of Miss Vanderplank, and 
sent men into the house to hiss and cry out " pickles " when Toobey 
the tragedian was performing his starring engagements, because, for- 
sooth, Toobey did not draw. He owes ten thousand pounds to Miss 
Larke, the soprano. He buys his wardrobe in Petticoat Lane. He 
drinks fearfully. He will be hung. I have been an editor, and know 
the amenities that are showered on those slaves of the lamp ; the people 
who accuse you of having set the Thames on fire, and murdered Eliza 
Grimwood, if you won't accept their interminable romances, and darkly 
insinuate that they will have your heart's blood if you decline to pay 
for poems copied from the annuals of eighteen hundred and thirty- six; 
but to find the acme of persecution and badgering commend me to a 
theatrical manager. 

Return we to our muttons. The theatre sleeps a sound, tranquil 
sleep for some hundred minutes ; but about six it begins to wake again 
to fresh life and activity. At half-past six it is wide awake and staring. 
The "dressers," male and female, have arrived, and are being objurgated 
by incensed performers in their several cabinets de toilette^ because they 
are slow in finding Mr. Lamplugh's bag wig, or Mademoiselle Folle- 
jambe's white satin shoes. The call-boy — that diminutive, weazened 
specimen of humanity, who has never, so it seems, been a boy, and 
never will be a man — has entered upon his functions, and already medi- 
tates a savage onslaught on the dressing-room doors, accompanied by 
a shrill intimation that the overture is " on." Let us leave the ladies 
and gentlemen engaged in the theatre to complete the bedizenment of 
their apparel, and, pending their entrance into the green-room, see 
what that apartment itself is made of. 

Of course it is on a level with the stage, and within a convenient 
distance of that prompt-box which forms the head-quarters of the call- 
boy, and where he receives instructions from his adjutant-general, the 
prompter. In country theatres, the green-room door is often within a 
foot or so from the wing; and there is a facetious story told of a whilom 



SEVEN P.M. A THEATRICAL GHEEN-EOOM. 243 

great tragedian, who, now retired and enjoying lettered and dignified 
ease as a country gentleman, was, in his day, somewhat remarkable for 
violent ebullitions of temper. He was playing Hamlet ; and in the 
closet scene with Gertrude, where he kills the old chamberlain, who 
lies in ambuscade, and just at the moment he draws his rapier, it 
occurred to his heated imagination that an inoffensive light comedian, 
ready dressed for the part of Osric, who was standing at the green- 
room door within reasonable sword range, was the veritable Polonius 
himself. Whereupon the tragedian, shrieking out, " A rat ! a rat ! 
dead, for a ducat — dead ! " made a furious lunge at the unhappy Osric ? 
who only escaped instant death by a timely hop, skip, and jump, and 
fled with appalling yells to a sofa, under which he buried himself. 
Tradition says that the tragedian's rapier went right through the 
wood- work of the half-opened door ; but I know that tradition is not 
always to be trusted, and I decline to endorse this particular one now. 
Our present green-room is a sufficiently commodious apartment, 
spacious and lofty, and fitted up in a style of decoration in which the 
Louis Quinze contends with the Arabesque, and that again with the 
Cockney Corinthian. The walls are of a pale sea-green, of the famous 
Almack's pattern ; and the floor is covered with a carpet of remarkably 
curious design and texture, offering some noteworthy specimens of 
worsted vegetation run to seed, and rents and fissures of extraordinary 
polygonal form. In one corner there is a pianoforte — a grand piano- 
forte ; at least it may have been at one time deserving of that high- 
sounding appellation ; but it is now a deplorable old music-box, with a 
long tail that would be much better between its legs, and keys that are 
yellow and worn down, like the teeth of an old horse. There is a 
cheval glass, too, in tolerably good repair, for the danseuses to arrange 
their skirts withal ; and over the chimney-piece there is another great 
glass, with a tarnished frame and longitudinal crack extending over iti 
in the sides of which — the interstices of the frame, I mean, not the 
crack — are stuck notices having reference to the rehearsals to be held 
on the morrow. " All the ladies of the ballet at ten ; " " All the com- 
pany for reading of new piece at twelve." So may run the wafered 
announcements signed in the fine Roman hand of the prompter or 
stage-manager. There are varied pilasters, in imitation of scagliola, 
supporting the ceiling ; the doors are handsomely panelled with gilt 
headings. There are four tall windows in a row, with cornices wofuliy 
dingy, and draped with curtains of shabby moreen. There is good 
store of settees and ottomans covered with faded chintz. Everything 



244 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




SEVEN P.M. — A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM. 245 

about the place bears that "stagey," unreal, garish, dream-like aspect, 
that seems inherent to things theatrical, and makes us, directly we pass 
the stage-door, look upon everything, from the delusive banquet on 
the imitation marble table, to the paint on the singing chambermaid's 
cheeks, as a mockery and a delusion — as the baseless fabric of a vision, 
that will soon fade and leave not a wrack behind. And yet I have 
said {vide ante ct supra) that " behind the scenes is common-place." 
And so it is ; but it is the common-place of dreamland, the every-day 
life of the realms of Prester John, the work-a-day existence of the 
kingdom of Cockaigne, or of that shadowy land where dwell the 
Anthropophagi, and men " whose heads do grow beneath their 
shoulders." 

What shall I assume the first piece that is to be performed this 
night to be? Will you have the "Flowers of the Forest," the "Poor 
Strollers," " Sweethearts and Wives," " Pizarro," the "Padlock," or 
a " Game at Romps : " What do you say to a fine old English comedy, 
such as "'John Bull," or the " School of Reform," with a dissipated 
young squire, a gouty, ill-tempered, and over-bearing old lord of the 
manor, an intensely-virtuous tenant-farmer, a comic ploughman, a 
milkmaid with a chintz gown tucked through the placket-holes, and a 
song, and a spotless but a persecuted maiden ? No ; you will have 
none of these ! Suppose, then, we take our dear old genial friend, the 
" Green Bushes " — long life and good luck to Mr. Buckstone, and may 
he write many more pieces as ^ood for our imaginary theatre. See ; 
the green-room clock points to ten minutes to seven — I left that out in 
my inventory of the furniture. The call-boy has already warned the 
ladies and gentlemen who are engaged for the first scene, that their 
immediate presence is required, and the erst-deserted green-room fills 
rapidly. 

See, here they came — the kindly old friends of the " Green Bushes" 
— Miami and Jack Gong, and Master Grinnidge ; and yet, dear me, 
what are these strange, wild costumes mingled with them ? Oh ! there 
is a burlesque after the drama. It is somewhat early in the evening 
for those who are to play in the second piece to come down dressed ; 
but then you are to consider this as a special green-room, a specimen 
green-room, an amalgam of the green-room element generally. This 
model foyer is to have something of the Haymarket and something 
of the Adelphi — the old by-gone, defunct Adelphi, I mean — a spice 
of the Olympic, a tinge of the Lyceum, and a dash of the Princess's, 
about it. I except the green-room of Drury Lane, which never re- 



246 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

sembled anything half so much as a family vault, and the green-rooms 
of the two Operas , which, though splendidly furnished and appointed, 
are almost deserted during the performances, the great tenori and 
soprani preferring to retire to their dressing-rooms when any long 
intervals of rest occur. 

"Things" — to use a bit of "Green Bushes " facetice, invented, I 
am willing to believe, by that incorrigible humourist, Mr. Wright, 
and which has grown proverbial — "things isn't as they used to 
was ; " and the attractions of green-rooms have deteriorated, even 
within my time* When I say " my time," I mean a quarter of a 
century ; for as I happened to be almost born in a prompt-box and 
weaned in a scene-painter's size -kettle, and have been employed in 
very nearly every capacity in and about a theatre — save that of an 
actor, which profession invincible modesty and incurable incompetency 
prevented me from assuming — I feel myself qualified to speak about 
the green-rooms with some degree of authority. To have read a 
three- act melodrama to a (scarcely) admiring audience, and to have 
called " everybody for the last scene" in a green-room, gives a man, 
I take it, a right to be heard. 

But, to tell the truth, green-rooms now-a-days are sadly dull, 
slow, humdrum places of resort. In a minor theatre they are some- 
what more lively, as there is there no second green-room, and the 
young sylphides of the corps de ballet are allowed to join the company. 
The conversation of these young ladies, if not interesting, is amusing, 
and if not brilliant, is cheerful. They generally bring their needle- 
work with them if they have to wait long between the scenes (fre- 
quently to the extent of an entire act) in which they have to dance, 
and they discourse with much naivete upon the warmth or coldness of 
the audience with reference to the applause bestowed, the bad temper 
of the stage-manager, and their own temporary indisposition from 
corns, which, with pickled salmon, unripe pears, the proper number 
of lengths for a silk dress, and the comparative merits of the whiskers 
and moustaches of the musicians in the band (with some of whose 
members they are sure to be in love, and w T hom they very frequently 
marry, leaving off dancing and having enormous families), form the 
almost invariable staple of a ballet-girl's conversation. Poor simple- 
minded, good-natured, hard-working little creatures, theirs is but a 
rude and stern lot. To cut capers and wear paint, to find one's own 
shoes and stockings, and be strictly virtuous, on a salary varying from 
nine to eighteen shillings a week — this is the pabulum of a ballet-girl. 



SEYEN P.M. — A THEATRICAL GREEN-BOOM. 247 

And hark in thine ear, my friend. If any man talks to you about the 
syrens of the ballet, the dangerous enchantresses and cockatrices of 
the ballet, the pets of the ballet, whose only thoughts are about 
broughams and diamond aigrettes , dinners at Richmond, and villas at 
St. John's Wood — if anybody tells you that the majority, or even a 
large proportion, of our English danseuses are inclined this perilous 
way, just inform him, with my compliments, that he is a dolt and a 
teller of untruths. I can't say much of ballet morality abroad; of 
the poor rats del' opera in Paris, who are bred to wickedness from 
their very cradle upwards ; of the Neapolitan hallerine, who are 
obliged to wear green cahoni^ and to be civil to the priests, lest they 
should be put down altogether ; or of the poor Russian ballet-girls, 
who live altogether in barracks, are conveyed to and from the theatre 
in omnibuses, and are birched if they do not behave themselves, and 
yet manage somehow to make a bad end of it ; but as regards our 
own syiphides, I say that naughtiness among them is the exception, 
and cheerful, industrious, self-denying perseverance in a hard, un- 
grateful life, the honourable rule. 

There are yet a few green-rooms where the genus " swell " still 
finds a rare admittance. See here a couple in full evening costume, 
talking to the pretty young lady in the low-necked dress on the 
settee ; but the swell is quite a fish out of water in the green-room of 
these latter days. Managers don't care quite so much for his patron- 
age, preferring to place their chief reliance and dependence on the 
public. The actors don't care about him, for the swell is not so 
generous as of yore in taking tickets for the benefits of popular 
favourites. Actresses mistrust him, for the swell has given up raising 
actresses to the peerage. The ballet- girls are half afraid of him ; and 
when they don't fear him, they laugh at him. So the swell wanders 
in and out of the green-rocm, and stares at people uneasily, and at 
last escapes to his brougham or his cabriolet at the stage- door. Now 
and then a wicked old lord of the unrighteous evil-living school of 
British peers, now happily becoming rarer and rarer every day, will 
come sniggering and chuckling into a green-room, hanging on the 
arm of the manager, with whom he is on the most intimate terms, 
and who " My Lords " him most obsequiously. He rolls his scandal- 
ous old eyes in his disreputable, puckered face, seeking some pretty, 
timid, blushing little flower, whom he may blight with his Upas gaze, 
and then totters away to his stage-box, where he does duty for the 
rest of the evening with a huge double-barrelled opera-glass. 



248 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Such is the green-room of to-day, quiet, occasionally chatty (for 
actresses and actors can be pleasant enough among themselves, in a cosy, 
sensible manner, talking about butcher's meat, and poor's-rates, and 
Brompton omnibuses) ; but not by any means the glittering Temple of 
Radiant Delight that some might feel inclined to imagine it. There 
have been days — and I remember them — when green-rooms were very 
different places. There were women on the stage then who were Queens 
as well as actresses, and had trains of admirers round their flowing 
robes. There was a slight nervous man in those days — a famous writer 
of plays and books that yet live, and will live while our English lan- 
guage is spoken— a strange-looking, high- cheek-boned man, with long 
hair carelessly thrown away from his forehead, and a piercing eye, that 
seemed to laugh to scorn the lorgnon dangling from its ribbon. I have 
seen him so, his spare form leaning against the mantel, and he shower- 
ing — yes, showering is the word— arrowy hon mots and corruscating 
repartees around him. He is dead : they all seem to be dead, those 
brilliant green-room men — Jerrold, Talfourd, Kenney, Haynes Bayley, 
Hook, A'Beckett. They have left no successors. The modern play- 
wrights skulk in and out of the manager's room, and are mistaken at 
rehearsal for the property-men. They forsake green-rooms at night for 
drawing-rooms, where they can hear themselves praised, or smoking- 
rooms of clubs, where they can abuse one another ; and if A. says a 
good thing, B. books it for his next petite comedie, which does not hurt 
A. much, seeing that he stole it from C, who translated it hot-and-hot 
from Monsieur de D., that great plagiarist from Lope de Vega. 

Come, let us leave the green-room to its simple devices, and see what 
they are doing " Behind the Scenes." You and I, we know, are in the 
receipt of fern-seed, and can walk invisible without incommoding our- 
self or anybody else, be the pressure ever so great; but I should 
strongly advise all swells and other intruders, if any such remain, 
either to withdraw into the shadiest recesses of the green-room, or to 
" get out of that" — to use an Irishism, without the least possible delay. 
For " Behind the Scenes" is clearly no place for them. If I were the 
manager of a theatre, I would not admit one single person into the 
coulisses save those connected with the night's performance, nay, nor 
allow even the employes of the theatre, till the call-boy summoned them 
to approach the wing. Madame Vestris established this Spartan rule 
of discipline, and found it answer in making her theatre the best- 
managed in Europe ; but it will be observed that no such ordre du 



SEVEN V.^Sl. BEHIND THE SCENES. 



210 




250 TV> r ICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

jour has been promulgated in the theatre behind whose scenes we find 
• ourselves to-night. What a confusion, what a hubbub, what a throng 
and bustle ! The dramatis personce, you will perceive, no longer con- 
template the performance of the " Green Bushes." Hoops, powder, 
brocade, black-patches, high-heelel shoes, bag- wigs, flapped waistcoats, 
and laced-hats prevail. This must be some Pompadour or Beau Tibbs 
piece — " Court Favour," or u Love's Telegraph," or some last century 
dramatic conceit by Mr. Planche or Mr. Dance. How the carpenters 
scuffle and stamp, entreating the bystanders, not always in the politest 
terms, to get out of the way ! Now and again the prompter rushes 
from his box, and in a hoarse sotto voce, that would be a shriek if it 
were not a whisper, commands silence. 

Upon my word, there is that unlucky old Flathers, the heavy man, 
who never knows his part ; there he is again, evidently imperfect, and 
taking a last desperate gulp of study, sitting in the property arm-chair, 
on the very brink of the stage. And see there — don't blush, don't 
stammer, but make as polite a bow as you can — there is Mrs. Woffing- 
ton Pegley, in full Pompadour costume, and such a hoop ! She is only 
twenty- three years of age ; has had two husbands ; Count Schrechny- 
synesky, the Moldo-Wallachian ambassador, is reported to be madly 
in love with her ; she rides in the park, she hunts, she drives, she owns 
a yacht, she has more diamonds and Mechlin lace than a duchess, and 
she is the most charming actress of the day. To be sure, she can't 
read very fluently, and can scarcely write her own name, but que voulez 
vous ? 

Don't you know that queer, quaint passage in good old Dr. John- 
son's life, where, soon after the production of his tragedy of "Irene," 
and when the lexicographer had even gone to the extent of appearing 
behind the scenes of the playhouse in a scarlet coat and laced-hat fiercely 
cocked, he suddenly told David Garrick that he could visit him behind 
the scenes no more, assigning his own honest sufficient reason ? The 
pretty actresses were too much for Samuel. He was but mortal man — 
mortal man. Their rosy cheeks — never mind whether the roses were 
artificial or not — their white necks, and dainty hands and feet, their 
rustling brocades and laced tuckers, disturbed the equanimity of our 
great moralist and scholar. He fled from the temptation wisely. Who 
can wonder at it 1 "Who, that is not a mysogynist, can sufficiently case 
himself in brass to withstand the Parthian glances of those pretty dan- 
gerous creatures ] Surely they dress better, look better, walk better, 



HER MAJESTY'S THEATRE, AND A PAWNBROKER'S SHOP. 251 

sit better, stand better, have clearer voices, cheerier laughs, more grace- 
ful curtsies, than any other women in the world. But they are not for 
the likes of you or me, Thomas. See, there is fat, handsome Captain 
Fitzblazer of the " Heavies," the Duke of Alma's aide-de-camp, pre- 
tending to flirt with little Fanny Merrylegs, the coryphee, and the 
rogue has one eye on Mrs. Wofhngton Pegley. I wish some robust 
scene-shifter would tread on his varnished toes. The Pegley is aware 
of the Fitzblazerian ceillade, I wager, though she makes-believe to be 
listening to young Martinmas, the walking gentleman's, nonsense. 
Come away, Thomas, come away, my friend. Let us strive to be as 
wise in our generation as Sam Johnson was in his, and write to Davy 
Garrick that we will come " behind the scenes" no more. 



EIGHT O'CLOCK P.M.— HER MAJESTY'S THEATRE, AND A 
PAWNBROKER'S SHOP. 

I think that I have held out something like a guarantee, in the course 
of these papers, that my readers shall be introduced to a fair amount of 
fashionable life. How far I have performed my promise it is for them 
to judge ; but I am not, myself, without misgivings. True it is that, 
under my guidance, they have perambulated Regent Street ; have dined 
off the fat of the land at a Public Dinner ; have betted at Tattersall's ; 
ridden in the Park; heard the band play at St. James's; strolled 
through the Pantheon Bazaar ; and lounged in a theatrical green-room : 
but then, have not I, discourteous cicerone, cajoled them into visiting 
strange unlovely places, dismal to look upon ; persuaded them to hang 
up their harps by the willows of the Custom-house quay, and listen to 
the slang of oyster-boatmen and bargees, at Billingsgate ; forced them 
to haunt the purlieus of police-courts, and witness the departure of 
prison-vans and their felonious cargoes ; to keep bad hours, and associate 
with newspaper boys, market-gardeners, paupers, and common people 
who travel by parliamentary train ; to become acquainted, in fact, with 
scenes and people distressingly low and unfashionable 1 It is true that 
I have not taken them to the lanes of Petticoat and Field ; to Duke, 



W0 
252 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

his Place ; or St. Mary, her Axe ; or Bevis, his Marks ; or Rag, its 
Fair ; or Whitechapel, its Butcher Row ; or Ratcliff 7 its Highway ; or 
Lock, his Fields ; or Somers Town, its Brill ; or Rats, their Castle ; or 
Whetstone, its Park ; or Jacob, his Island ; or Southwark, its Mint ; 
or Lambeth, its New Cut ; or St. Giles, its Church Lane and Hamp- 
shire Hog Lane. If I have not moved them so to travel with me, it is 
not, I fear, through any laches of intention or deficiency of will, but 
simply because I have at different seasons travelled over every inch of 
the road I have named with other readers, and that I have a decent 
horror of repeating myself, and respect for the maxim of non bis in 
idem. 

Be my demerits granted or disallowed, I have still some time left to 
me wherein to make amends. Though it may be my duty, ere we have 
finished, to lead you again into dismal and wretched places, you shall 
have at least an instalment of fashionable life now ; and — follow 
honest Sancho's advice as to not looking the gift-horse in the mouth ; 
be satisfied with my assurance that this present one is of the pure 
Godolphin Arabian lineage, elegant in form, unquestionable in mettle, 
electrical in swiftness. The next may be but a sorry nag, spavined, 
blown, wind-galled, and sprung. You must take the bad with the 
good, in this world, and in all things. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to the Opera — to her Majesty's 
Theatre in the Haymarket ; and by eight o'clock it behoves us all to be 
in our seats, if we wish to hear the first bars of the overture. It is true 
that if we are so fortunate as to possess, or to hire, or to have opera- 
boxes given to us, we do not, frequently, make our appearance in the 
theatre till past nine o'clock ; and that, if we are lessees or renters of 
stalls, the ballet has frequently commenced before we condescend to 
occupy our seats ; but if the pit or the amphitheatre be our destination, 
we had much better present ourselves at the entrance immediately the 
doors open, and secure seats with what speed we may. It is a peculi- 
arity of her Majesty's Theatre that whether the iC house" be a good one 
or a bad one, there are always, before the termination of the first act of 
the opera, some occupants of the pit w T ho are compelled to content them- 
selves with standing-room. 

Opinions are divided as to the place in the enceinte of the magnifi- 
cent theatre where the greatest enjoyment of the performance can be 
obtained. To some, a box on the grand tier — vast, roomy, with space 
for six to sit abreast — is considered the superlative of operatic felicity. 



HER MAJESTY S THEATRE, AND A PAWNBROKER S SHOP. 253 

Others hold out stoutly for the artistic fourth tier, where, they declare, 
they can hear and see better than their lowly-placed neighbours. There 
are many who abide by the stalls, despite of those who declare that in 
the front rows thereof the voices of the singers are drowned by the con- 
tiguity of the braying band. The pit has its defenders, who allege that 
distance not only " lends enchantment to the view," but chastens the 
instrumental exuberances of the orchestra ; but perhaps the most ener- 
getic advocates of the merits of their own particular seats are the 
dwellers in the high-up amphitheatre or gallery, who boldly declare 
that it is in that elevated position alone, that you can enjoy, in the full 
extent of their beauty, the gems of the opera, and that the sole place fit 
for the presence of the genuine amateur is the operatic paradise, ascent 
to which is permitted for the sum of three-and-sixpence or half-a-crown. 

Ee our election, however, the stalls. From those comfortable 
fauteuils let us explore the ample field — see what the open, what the 
covert yield ; and, as we expatiate over this scene of Man, own that, 
though " a mighty maze," it is " not without a plan." For there is a 
plan of her Majesty's Theatre in the box-office. 

Am I treading on any one's toes, disturbing any one's prejudices, 
predilections, or pre-formed opinions, in asseverating that the interior 
of Mr. Lumley's establishment offers, with one exception, the most 
magnificent conp-d 1 -ceil of any Opera in Europe that I have seen % 
Mark the cunning qualification ! I say, that I have seen ; for they tell 
me that there is an Opera at Barcelona (which nutty sea-port I have 
never visited), a theatre surpassing in grandeur, and richness of decora- 
tion, all the lyric temples of the continent or of these isles ; and so far as 
mere size is concerned, the palm must, I believe, be yielded to Parma, 
in which caseous Italian city there exists — yet unexplored by me — a 
huge tumble- down, ruinous, leaky, mildewed salle, which is as the Tower 
of Babel of Opera-houses the Great Eonassus of theatres. I speak of 
the houses which these weak eyes, in the course of many years' wander- 
ing, have surveyed, through powerful-iensed lorgnettes. Give me her 
Majesty's. Above the dreary Scala, with its naked tiers above tiers, 
its sediti chuisi, and the three reserved front rows of the pit, where the 
authorities were compelled to put the white-blanketed Austrian officers, 
lest they should come to blows (they often squabbled in the lobbies even) 
with the spiteful Milanese ; the ghastly, dingy, ill-lighted Scala — (it is 
bigger by far than her Majesty's, though) — with its rabbit-hutch-like 
private boxes, whose doors are scrawled over with the penny plain and 



254 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

twopence coloured-like coats of arms of the effete and decadent Lom- 
bardian nobility. Above the boasted Grand Opera at Paris, tawdry, 
inconvenient, and chopped up into unreasonable sections. Above the 
Burg Theater, at Vienna ; the Theatre de la Monnaie, at Brussels. 
Above, even, the superb little Opernhaus, at Berlin, which, though a gem 
in its way, is but as a diamond aigrette to the Koh-i-noor. Above the 
late Royal Italian Opera House, in Bow Street, Co vent Garden, London, 
which was simply a big theatre, ill-built, and undecorated. For the 
solitary exception I have hinted at you must go north, very far north 
into Europe, and in the city of Moscow, in the empire of Holy Russia, 
you shall find an Italian Opera House unprecedented, I verily believe, 
for size, for splendour, for comfort, for elegance, and for taste. It 
was not my fortune to be present in Moscow on the occasion of the 
coronation fetes, when the theatre I speak of was opened to the public 
preparatory to the regular winter season ; but for a description of 
its glories I must refer those curious in operatic matters to my friend 
Mr. Henry Sutherland Edwards, who w T as resident many months in the 
city of the Kremlin, and whom I sincerely w r ish I could persuade to do, 
in better part, for Moscow the holy that which I have myself endea- 
voured, according to my lights, to do for St. Petersburg the mundane. 

Look around you, in the vast arena of her Majesty's. Wonder and 
admire, for such a sight it is not permitted to you often to behold. 
Look around, and around again, the enormous horseshoe ; look from 
base to summit, at this magnificent theatre, glorious with beauties and 
with riches. Here are gathered the mighty, and noble, and wealthy, 
the venerable and wise, the young and beauteous of the realm. The 
prime minister seeks at the opera a few hours' relaxation from the toils 
of office ; the newly-married peeress there displays the dazzling diamonds 
custom now T , for the first time, permits her to wear; the blushing 
maiden of seventeen, "just out" — that very day, perhaps, presented 
at Court — smiles and simpers in a shrine of gauze and artificial flowers. 
Mark yonder, that roomy box on the grand tier, which a quiet, plainly- 
dressed party has just entered. There is a matronly lady in black, 
with a few bugle ornaments in her coiffure. She ensconces herself in a 
corner, her back towards the audience, screens herself with a curtain, 
and then calmly proceeds to take a review of the front rows of the 
stalls, and the occupants of the proscenium boxes. It is not considered 
etiquette to take more than a cursory glimpse of the matronly lady in 
black through your opera-glass. Presently there sits down by the 



HER MAJESTY S THEATRE, AND A PAWNBROKER S SHOP. 255 

matronly lady's side, a handsome, portly, middle-aged gentleman, in 
plain sober evening dress, and with a very high forehead — so high, 
indeed, that I don't think that the assumption that the middle-aged 
gentleman's head inclined to baldness would be unreasonable. In the 
opposite angle of the box sits a demure young lady — sometimes a 
couple of demure ones — who doesn't move much or speak much ; and 
at the back of the loge are two gentlemen in white waistcoats, who 
never sit down, and, from the exquisitely uncomfortable expression of 
their countenances, would appear to be standing on one leg. Now, 
take the hat of your heart off, for your head, according to operatic 
sumptuary laws, must be already uncovered, and with your spirit 
salaam thrice three times, for the matronly lady is Victoria Queen of 
England, and the middle-aged gentleman, inclined to corpulence and 
baldness, is his Eoyal Highness the Prince Consort. The demure ones 
are maids of honour or ladies in waiting ; and as for the white-waist- 
coated uncomfortables (seemingly) on one leg, one may be the tremen- 
dous Gold Stick himself, and the other — who shall say ? — the ineffable 
Phipps, pride of chivalry and pearl of privy purses. 

On the same tier, but nearer the stage, there is a narrow box, hold- 
ing only two persons de face, at whose occupants you may gaze with- 
out any glaring dereliction of the proprieties. See, a lady who screens 
herself behind the amber satin drapery, even more completely than her 
Majesty, and by her side an elderly gentleman, with a large mouth, a 
very stiff white neckcloth, and a very severe aspect, and about whose 
tendency to baldness there cannot exist any doubt, inasmuch as his 
cranium is as bare and polished as a billiard-ball. It would be a 
pardonable guess to presume this individual to be a member of the 
College of Preceptors, or a proctor, fresh from Doctors' Commons ; but 
if you eye him narrowly through the many-lensed lorgnette, you will 
perceive that he wears a little badge of parti-coloured ribands at his 
button-holes, and on some evenings you may even discern a brilliant 
star tacked on the left breast of his coat. Who is this distinguished 
bald one 1 I must not be personal with less distinguished people than 
royalty, and so I will content myself with calling him his Excellency. 
His Excellency dwells in an enormous mansion in Belgravia, where he 
gives grand parties. His own little cabinet is, I am told, decorated 
with charming-coloured lithographs, representing scenes Oriental and 
operatic; and, indeed, his Excellency has been throughout his long 
and ornamental life a consistent and liberal patron of Terpsichore. 



256 TWICE ROUXD THE CLOCK. 

He never misses a new ballet night now. Occasionally, his Excellency 
has some business to transact with the Baron Fitzharris, Earl of Malmes- 
bury ; but the old fogies of the clubs, and the chronic alarmists of the 
newspapers, are haunted by the notion that his Excellency is per- 
jDetually weaving plots, and entangling British statesmen in the mazes 
of his dark diplomacy. For my part, I think that very often, when 
his Excellency is supposed to be busily occupied in concocting his 
Machiavelian plots, the good man is quietly at home snipping away 
the outlines of his favourite coloured lithographs, and pasting them in 
albums or on screens. You know what the Chancellor Oxenstiern said 
to his son anent the small amount of wisdom, with which this world is 
governed ; and I think as much might be said concerning diplomacy. 
But his Excellency has a terrible reputation for undermining, plotting, 
and counter-plotting, and is supposed to be, intellectually, a compound 
of the dark and crooked astuteness of Talleyrand, Metternieh, ex-In- 
spector Field, and the late Joseph Adv. 

I might tire you out, and exhaust a space already growing limited, 
by drawing portraits of the denizens of opera-boxes. Our glances at 
them must be, perforce, rapid, for I dare not linger. See, there (he 
comes late, does not seem to enjoy the music much, and stays but for 
an hour) seventy-three years worth of learning, of genius, of wit, of 
eloquence, and patriotism — that glorious edifice of humanity, of which 
the first stone was laid by a young north-country advocate, who was 
a friend of Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, and wrote stinging articles in the 
" Edinburgh Review." No man so famous as that whilom chancellor 
has her Majesty's Theatre reckoned among its audience, since the days 
when, in spotless white waistcoat, and creaseless cravat, with a silver 
buckle behind, the great duke was wont to make his bow at the court 
of Euterpe, not because, honest man, he cared much for operas, Italian 
or English, but because he considered it to be a matter of duty towards 
that aristocracy of which, though a premier duke, he was the prince, 
to show himself in their places of resort. He went everywhere, the 
brave old boy, to balls and concerts, to routs and banquets. In the 
house of feasting, when the goblets were wreathed with flowers, and 
the cymbals clashed, there was Duke Arthur, long after his gums were 
toothless, his eyes dim, his joints stiffened, and the drums of his ears 
muffled. And, next morning, at eight o'clock, you would still see him 
on duty, at early service, in St. James's Church, reading out the re- 
sponses to the Psalms as though they were words of command. 



HER, MAJESTY S THEATRE, AND A PAWNBROKER S SHOP. 257 




2£3 TVriCE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

There, in her family box, is the still beautiful marchioness, with 
that crop of ringlets unequalled in luxuriance. There, in the stalls, is 
Captain Fitzblazer, the Duke of Alma's aide-de-camp, whom we met 
'•'behind the scenes" an hour since. "Jemmy" Fitzblazer— he is 
always known as "Jemmy," though there are not half-a-dozen men of 
his acquaintance who would presume thus familiarly to address him to 
his face— is getting very middle-aged and gray-headed now. He is not 
slim enough in the waist. Adonis is growing fat. Narcissus has the 
gout. Lesbians sparrow is moulting. A sad reflection, but so runs the 
world. 

I should be wilfully deceiving you, and unworthy the name I have 
been always striving to gain—that of a faithful chronicler— if I were to 
lead you to imagine that the brilliant theatre is full only of rank, fashion, 
wealth, and happiness. Are any of the terms I have used synonymous, 
I wonder. There are many aching hearts, doubtless, beneath all this 
jewellery and embroidery; many titled folks who are thinking of 
pawning their plate on the morrow, many dashing young scions of 
aristocracy, who, between the bars of the overture, are racking their 
brains as to how on earth they are to meet Mephibosheth's bill, and 
whether a passage through the Insolvent Court would not be, after 
all, the best way out of their difficulties. And in the great equality 
that dress-coats, bare shoulders, white neckcloths, and opera-cloaks 
make among men and women, how much dross and alloy might we not 
find among the gold and silver ! In the very next box to the mother 
of the Gracchi, resplendent among her offspring, in her severe beauty, 
is poor pretty lost Mrs. Demmymond, late Miss Yanderplank, of the 
Theatres Royal. The chaste Yolumnia, who only comes to the opera 
once in the season, and always goes away before the commencement of 
the ballet, is elbowed in the crush-room by 3Iiss G-olightly, who has 
one of the best boxes that Mr. Sams can let, and who comes with a head 
of flaxen hair one night, and with raven black tresses the next. Cap- 
tain Spavin, of the 3rd Jibbers, shudders when he finds his next-stall 
neighbour to be his long-suffering tailor ; and Sir Hugh Hempenridge, 
baronet, is covered with confusion when he feels the hawk-glance of 
little Casay, the sheriff's officer (and none so bravely attired as he) 
darted full at him from Fops' Alley. 

Fops' Alley ! The word reminds me of bygone operatic days, and 
I sigh when, looking round the house, I remember how Time, the 
destroyer, has left a mark, too, upon these cari luoghi. It is true that 



HER MAJESTY S THEATEE, AXD A PAWXBROKETl S SHOP. 259 

many of those reminiscences may not be worth sighing for; but is there 
not always something melancholy in the fading away of old associa- 
tions ? "Where is the Omnibus Box ? The longitudinal den answering 
to the Loge Infernale at Paris, and the Fosse aux Lions at Madrid, yet 
has its customary locality oyer the orchestra, on the Queen's side of the 
proscenium ; but where are its brilliant, witty, worthless occupants ? 
But one, the gay young prince, who, if report says true, kicked, with 
his own royal foot, through the panels of the door of communication 
leading from the Omnibus Box to the stage, and for that night — the 
night of the famous Tamburini and Coletti disturbance- — locked by 
special order of M. Laporte, has become a Respectable, holds high 
office, does his work well, and occupies himself far more with the sub- 
jects of soldiers' kit and barrack accommodation, than with squabbles 
between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But where are the rest % Where 
the dashing spirits and impetuous madcaps of twenty years since ] One 
is in a lunatic asylum, and another is paralytic, and a third is prowling 
about the gambling- places on the Rhine, and the last I saw of a fourth, 
was once, in 18-52, descending the stairs of the Hotel des Bains, at 
Dieppe, when a companion, drawing me on one side as a broken, bowed, 
decrepit, sunken-eyed, gray-headed, prematurely-aged man passed us 
tottering on a stick, whispered to me, <( See ! there goes D'Orsay;" 
who died a fortnight afterwards. 

A Liberal, I hope — a Democrat, if you will — on some not unim- 
portant public topics, I cannot help a species of meek wailing Con- 
servatism upon the decadence of some of our social institutions. This 
is the age of abolition — of doing aw T ay with and putting down. They 
have robbed our grenadiers of their worsted epaulettes. The beefeaters 
in the Tower have been deprived of those scarlet and embroidered 
tunics, that contrasted so quaintly with the pantaloons and highlows of 
everyday life, and thrust into buttoned-up coats and brass buttons. 
The barristers' wigs will go next, I suppose, and the cocked-hat of the 
parish beadle — his red plush shorts and buckled shoon are already de- 
parted. I have fears for the opera ; I tremble for the days when there 
will be bonnets in the upper tiers and paletots in the pit. When I 
mind the opera first, it was a subaltern's, and not a sergeant's, guard 
that kept watch and ward under the portico. The officer on duty had 
a right of entrance ex officio into the pit, and it was splendid to see 
him swinging his bearskin and flashing his epaulettes in Fops' Alley. 
The very name of Fops' Alley is becoming obsolete now. The next 



2G0 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

generation will forget its locality. In those days, on drawing-room 
nights, the men used to come in their court suits and uniforms, their 
stars and badges, the ladies in their ostrich plumes and diamond neck- 
laces, only taking off their trains. There were opera-hats in those 
days — half moon cocked-hats ; now the men carry Gibuses like pan- 
cakes. The link boys are disappearing — the leather-lunged, silver- 
badged fellows, who shouted so sonorously that Lady Sardanapalias' 
carriage stopped the way. And the glories of the operatic stage ; are 
not those inconstant singing birds fled now ? Can all the Arditis in 
the world compensate for Costa, with his coat thrown back, and those 
immortal, tight-fitting white kid gloves ? He was the first man who 
ever succeeded in parting his hair down the back : and now, he too is 
growing bald, and he has cajoled Grisi the mellifluous, and Mario the 
heroic, to pipe their nightingale notes among the coach-builders of 
Long Acre, and the fried-fish shopmen of Drury Lane. Of the glorious 
unequalled, unapproachable Four — Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and 
Lablache — who once electrified the world in the " Puritani," three 
are dead : the first is in Coven t Garden provoking malevolent criticism. 
Where are the other Four, the Terpsichorean quartett, the immortals 
w r ho danced the pas cle quatre ! Ah ! Mademoiselle Piccolomini, you 
are very arch and pretty ; ah ! Mademoiselle Marie Taglioni, you are 
a sjrirituelle and graceful dancer ; but you are not the giants and 
giantesses of the old Dead Days. 

" You little people of the skies, 
What are you when the sun shall rise !" 

But the sun is set, and there is darkness, and I am afraid that I am 
prosing in re her Majesty's Theatre, as old playgoers will prose about 
Jack Bannister, sir, and Dowton, and Munden, and Fawcett. 

There is lately come to town, at least within these latter years, an 
Italian gentleman by the name of Verdi, to whose brassy screeds, and 
tinkling cymbalics, it is expected that all habitues of the opera must 
listen, to the utter exclusion and oblivion of the old musical worthies 
who delighted the world with their immortal works before Signor 
Verdi was born. I have brought you to her Majesty's Theatre, and 
this is unfortunately a Verdi night. You may listen to him, but I 
won't. Thersites Theorbo, the editor of the " Spinet " (with which is 
incorporated that famous musical journal the " Jew's Harp"), may 
accuse me of being " perfunctory," or of being an ass — no one minds 



HER MAJESTY'S THEATRE, AND A PAWNBROKER'S SHOP. 261 

Thersites Theorbo, knowing him to be a good fellow, much bemused in 
Cavendish tobacco and counterpoint • but I will shut my eyes, and 
muse upon the bygone glories of the opera. The place is a mass of 
memories. Things and books, and scenes and men, and stories, come 
teeming on my brain as I sit in my stall, heedless of Signor Yerdi and 
his musical machinations. From that shelf, well known to me, where 
nestle my dog's-eared Rabelais, my Montaigne, my annotated edition of 
Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, my Shakspeare, and 
my beloved Jeremy Taylor, I take down garrulous old Pepys, and 
read — " Jan. 12, 1667. With my Lord Brouncker to his house, there 
to hear some Italian Musique, and here we met Tom Killigrew, Sir 
Robert Murray, and the Italian Signor Baptista, who had prepared a 
play for the Opera, which Sir T. Killigrew do intend to have up \ and 
here he did sing one of the acts. He is himself the poet as well as 
the musician, and did sing the whole from the words without any 
musique prick' d, and played all along on a harpiscon most admirably, 
and the composition most excellent." And then I mind me of an 
advertisement in the "London Gazette," in 1692, setting forth how 
"the Italian lady that is lately come over, that is so famous for sing- 
ing, will sing at the concerts at York Buildings during the season." 
The season ! There was a "'season" in William the Deliverer's time, 
then. So I call to mind Dick Steele's serio-comic announcement in 
the fourth number of the " Tattler," of how " Letters from the Hay- 
market inform us that on Saturday night last the opera of ' Pyrrhus 
and Demetrius' was performed with great applause." Then from the 
beginning of Italian opera in England, a grand trunk line extending to 
our days, I shunt off on to innumerable little branches and loop-lines. 
I see the Faustina and the Cuzzoni coming to blows — Sir Robert Wal- 
pole backing the first, his lady the second. I am, for the nonce, an 
ardent partisan of Mrs. Tofts. Then I have a vision of Mrs. Fox Lane, 
in a hoop of preternatural size, bidding General Crewe get out of her 
house, because he professed his ignorance as to whom Signora Mingotti 
was — the Mingotti who told Dr. Burney that she had (: been frequently 
hissed by the English for having a toothache, a cold, or a fever, to 
which the good people of England will readily allow every human 
being to be liable except an actress or a singer." And then I bow down 
in awe before the radiant shadow of Farinelli, great and good, unmoved 
by misfortune, unspoilt by fame — -Farinelli, whose dulcet notes cured 
a Spanish king of madness, who was thought worthy to receive 



262 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

the decorations of the orders of St. Jago and of Calatrava — Farinelli, 
of whom honest Will Hogarth could not help falling a little foul in the 
" Rake's Progress," but who was, nevertheless, as singularly modest 
and upright as he was unprecedentedly gifted in his art. Unprece- 
dentedly ! recall the w r ord. I bow before a greater shadow, though of 
one who wrote, and sang not, save to his pretty wife.* I see a little 
boy, in a grave court suit, and his young locks curling like the tendrils 
of the vine, sitting before the harpsichord in the orchestra of the great 
theatre of Milan, It is the first night of a new opera, and the opera 
is his — this almost suckling. Upstairs, in a box near the chandelier, 
is the little man's father, sobbing, and smiling, and vowing candles to 
the Virgin, if his dear child's opera succeeds. And it does succeed, and 
all Milan is full of that small maestro's, that maestrino's fame, the next 
day. I see him again, years afterwards, grown to be a slight, vivacious 
little personage, in a scarlet pelisse and a cocked-hat. He is standing 
behind the scenes at the w T ing of the Imperial Theatre at Vienna, and 
it is again the first night of the performance of a new opera — his own. 
There is a singer in a Spanish costume, and who must be, I take it, a 
species of barber. When he sings a song, commencing tl Non piu 
andrai farfallone amoroso" the little man in the scarlet pelisse and 
cocked-hat begins to beat his palms together in applause, and murmurs 
"Bravo ! Bravo ! Benucci!" But when the singer winds up in that 
magnificent exercitation to Cherubino, " Alia vittoria ! Alia gloria 
militar!" the house comes down with applause. The people shout 
out ; the fat-headed musicians in the orchestra beat their violin bows 
violently against their desks, and (quite in defiance of operatic dis- 
cipline) cry "Bravo! Bravo! Viva! viva! grande maestro!" I see 
the same little man lying sick and pining on his bed at Salzburg. 
The intrigues of Salieri, the ingratitude of courts, the quick forgetful- 
ness of the public, are nothing to him now. Little does it matter if 
he have been indeed poisoned with aqua tofana, or if he be dying of 
that common, but denied disease, a broken heart. He has written the 
Requiem (recreant Sussmayer will strive to rob him even of that fame 
after death), and his last hour is approaching. The poor Swan dies ; 
and then the sluice-gates of my eyes are opened, and I remember that 
this was Johann Wolfgang von Mozart. 

Upon my word and honour there is Van Poggi, the chorus-singer, 

* Who married again, and extinguished herself. So did Maria Louisa, so did 
Mrs. Shelley. They will marry again, those unconscionable feminin.es. 



HER MAJESTY S THEATRE, AND A PAWXBECKES S SHOP. 263 

on the stage. I am recalled at once from dreamland to actualities. 
There is an old operatic saying that her Majesty's Theatre, in the Hay- 
market, could not be complete without Van Poggi, and now behold 
that lyrical Widdicomb. According to the same tradition — not always 
trustworthy — Yan Poggi was the identical chorus-singer who assisted 
Velluti to alight from his barge the night the last of those male 
soprani made his first appearance (in the opera of the " Crociato in 
Egitto") before an audience who had almost forgotten the fame of the 
Pacchierottis, the Rubinellis, and the Marchesis. Van Poggi wears 
wonderfully well. Nobody knows his exact nationality : whether he 
is a Dutchman, a Dane, or an Italian. His residence has never been 
precisely ascertained. The management hare no occasion to rout him 
up, for he is always punctual at rehearsal. During the vacation he 
retires to Paris, where he tells his friends that he is to be found 
between ten and four every day in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. 
During the London season you may contemplate Van Poggi between 
the same hours in Mr. Zerubbabel's cigar-shop in the Quadrant, at 
whose door he generally stands in a Spanish cloak faced with velvet. 
He never sang any better or any worse than he sings now ; he was 
never promoted to play the smallest separate part, such as is from time 
to time assigned to the gentleman who appears in the bills as Signor 
N. N., or non nominate. It is believed that Van Poggi would faint 
if he had to deliver a line of recitative. Yet there is a very general 
opinion in operatic circles that her Majesty's Theatre would come to 
hopeless grief if Van Poggi were not among the chorus. At the com- 
mencement of the season there are always anxious inquiries at the box- 
office as to whether Van Poggi is secured ; and a reply being given in 
the affirmative, the lovers of the lyrical drama breathe freely, and the 
subscription progresses. No one knows what became of Van Poggi in 
the dark and dismal interregnum during which Mr. Lumley was com- 
pelled to close his doors. Mysterious offers of better parts, and better 
salaries, had, it is reported, been made to Van Poggi, emanating from a 
quarter not a hundred miles from Bow Street, Covent Garden ; but the 
patriotic chorister scornfully refused them. He was still seen to haunt 
Mr. Zerubbabel's cigar-shop at the commencement of the musical 
season ; then he suddenly disappeared ; and whether he went abroad,, 
or wrapped himself in the Spanish cloak and so lay torpid for two 
years like a dormouse, must for ever remain a matter for speculation. 
But it is certain that when the Haymarket Phoenix arose frem its 



264 TWICE ROL^XD THE CLOCK. 

ashes, and light once more shone on its amber satin curtains, there was 
Van Poo-ai at the first chorus rehearsal, as fresh as paint, and looking 
better than ever. And it is moreover reported, that when his Excel- 
lency, whom a combination of political difficulties (which began about 
the time some English grenadiers were sent out to Gallipoli) had forced 
to leave this country, and who did not return for upwards of three 
years, when his Excellency Baron .... made his first visit to his be- 
loved opera-house, the piece of the evening being " Lucia di Lammer- 
moor," he swept the ranks of those preposterous sham Highlanders, 
who are discovered singing a sham hunting chorus, anxiously with his 
lorgnette, and at last cried out with a satisfied accent : "Bon, voila 
Van Poggi." He had recognised that chorus-singer in his kilt, and 
was thenceforth persuaded that the opera season was safe. 

There is a new ballet to-night, in which the enchanting little Poc- 
chini, most modest and most graceful of modern danseuses, is to appear ; 
and Signor Verdi's opera is very long, and I am aweary of his figments, 
and cannot sit them out. Besides, I want your presence, trusty friend 
and companion, always in the interest of " Twice Round the Clock.' ' 
We have a little business to transact ; and as it is getting towards nine 
o'clock, we had better transact it at once. Leave we then the dazzling 
temple, let us hie to an obscure retreat, to your servant known, where 
we can leave our opera-glasses, divest ourselves of our white cravats, and 
throw paletots over our evening dress. There, a few touches, and the 
similitude of swells is taken away from us. Now let us plunge into a 
labyrinth of narrow streets to attain our unfashionable goal, for, upon 
my w r ord, our destination is a pawnbroker's shop. 

Where the long lane from St. Giles's to the Strand divides the many- 
branching slums ; where flares the gas over coarse scraps of meat in cheap 
butchers' shops ; where brokers pile up motley heaps of second-hand 
wares — from fishing-rods and bird-cages to flat-irons and blankets ; from 
cornet-a-pistons and "Eamily Encyclopaedias " to corkscrews and fowl- 
ing-pieces ; where linen-drapers are invaded by poorly-clad women and 
girls, demanding penn'orths of needles, ha'porths of buttons, and far- 
thingworths of thread ; where jean stays flap against the door jambs, 
and "men's stout hose" gleam gaunt in the shop-windows; where 
grimy dames sit in coal and potato-sheds, and Jew clothesmen wrestle 
for the custom of passengers who don't want to buy anything ; where 
little dens, reeking with the odours of fried fish, sausages, and baked 
potatoes, or steaming with reminders of a-la-mocle beef and hot eel soup, 



EIGHT P.M. — INTERIOR OF A PAWNBROKER S SHOP. 



265 




266 TWICE EOTJND THE CLOCK. 

offer suppers, cheap and nasty, to the poor in pocket ; where, in low 
coffee-shops, newspapers a fortnight old, with coffee-cup rings on them, 
suggest an intellectual pabulum, combined with bodily refreshment ; 
where gaping public-houses receive or disgorge their crowds of tattered 
topers j where u general shops n are packed to overflowing with hetero- 
geneous odds and ends — soap, candles, Bath brick, tobacco, Dutch 
cheese, red herrings, firewood, black lead, streaky bacon, brown sugar, 
birch brooms, lucifer matches, tops, marbles, hoops, brandy balls, packets 
of cocoa, steel pens, cheap periodicals, Everton toffy, and penny canes ; 
where on each side, peeping down each narrow thoroughfare, you see a 
repetition only of these scenes of poverty and misery ; where you have 
to elbow and jostle your way through a teeming, ragged, ill-favoured, 
shrieking, fighting population — by oyster-stalls and costermongers' bar- 
rows — by orange-women and organ-grinders — by flower-girls and match- 
sellers — by hulking labourers and brandy-faced viragos, squabbling at 
tavern doors — by innumerable children in every phase of weazened, 
hungry, semi-nakedness, who pullulate at every corner, and seem cast up 
on the pavement like pebbles on the sea-shore. Here, at last,, we find 
the hostelry of the three golden balls, where the capitalist, whom men 
familiarly term "my uncle," lends money on the security of plate, 
jewellery, linen, wearing apparel, furniture, bedding, books — upon every- 
thing, in fact, that is not in itself of so perishable a nature as to warrant 
the probability of its rotting upon my uncle's shelves. 

The pawnbroker's shop window — the etalage, as our Parisian neigh- 
bours would term it — presents a medley of merchandise for sale ; for I 
suppose the host of the three balls buys-in sundry articles at the quar- 
terly sales of unredeemed pledges, of whose aspect you have already had 
an inkling in these pages, which he thinks are likely to sell in his par- 
ticular neighbourhood. Of course, the nature and quality of the articles 
exhibited vary according to the locality. In fashionable districts (for 
even Fashion cannot dispense with its pawnbrokers) you may see 
enamels and miniatures, copies of the Italian masters, porcelain vases, 
bronze statuettes, buhl clocks, diamond rings, bracelets, watches, cash- 
mere shawls, elegantly-bound books, and cases of mathematical instru- 
ments ; but we are now in an emphatically low neighbourhood, and such 
articles as I have alluded to are likely to attract but few purchasers. 
Rather would there seem a chance of a ready sale for the bundles of 
shirts, and women's gear, and cheap printed shawls ; for the saws, and 
planes, adzes, gimlets, and chisels ; for the cotton umbrellas ; for the 



EIGHT P.M. INTERIOR OF A PAWNBROKER S SHOP. 267 

heavy silver watches that working men wear (though they, even, are not 
plentiful) ; for the infinity of small cheap wares, for sale at an alarming 
reduction of prices. 

Let us enter. Behold the Bezesteen of borrowed money. This, too, 
might be compared, with a grim mockery, to the theatre ; for hath it 
not private boxes and a capacious stage, on which is continually being 
performed the drama of the "Rent Day," and the tragi-comedy of 
" Lend me Five Shillings ? " 

See the pawners, so numerous that the boxes can no longer remain 
private, and two or three parties, total strangers to one another, are all 
crowded into the same aperture. It is Saturday night, and they are 
deliriously anxious to redeem their poor little remnants of wearing 
apparel for that blessed Sunday that comes to-morrow, to be followed, 
however, by a Black Monday, when father's coat, and Polly's merino 
frock, nay the extra petticoat, nay the Lilliputian boots of the toddling 
child, will have to be pawned again. Certain wise men, political eco- 
nomists and pseudo-philanthropists, point at the plethora of pawn- 
brokers' shops as melancholy proofs of the poor's improvidence. But 
the poor are so poor, they have at the best of times so very little money, 
that pawning with them is an absolute necessity; and the pawnbroker's 
shop, that equitable mortgage on a small scale, is to them rather a 
blessing than a curse. Without that fourpence on the flat-iron, there 
would be very frequently no bread in the cupboard. 

It is Saturday night, and my uncle, who on other days of the week 
shuts at six o'clock in winter and eight in summer time, does not close 
his doors, and drives a roaring trade till midnight. The half-pence 
rattle, shillings are tested, huge bundles rumble down the spout, and 
the little black calico bags, containing the tickets having reference to 
the goods desired to be redeemed, and which the assistant will look out 
in the warehouse, fly rapidly upwards. It is time now for us to redeem 
that trifling little matter which we pawned last Tuesday, on purpose to 
have an excuse for visiting the pawnbroker's shop to-night ; and, casting 
glances in which curiosity is not unmixed with compassion, go back to 
Signor Verdi and her Majesty's Theatre. Thou, at least, my friend, may 
do this — I will leave thee in the vestibule for awhile ; for, between the 
hours of "nine and ten, I have other clock matters to which I must 
attend. 



268 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 



NINE O'CLOCK P.M.— HALF-PRICE IN THE NEW CUT, 
AND A DANCING ACADEMY, 

An inedited anecdote of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., — an anecdote passed 
over or ignored by Boswell, Croker, Piozzi, and Hawkins, — an anecdote 
to allude to which, perhaps, Lord Macaulay might disdain, while Mr. 
Carlyle might stigmatise it as an " unutterable sham of mud-volcano 
gigability," but in w.hich I have, nevertheless, under correction, the 
most implicit faith, relates that the Sage's opinion was once asked by 
Oliver Goldsmith (Mr. Boswell of Aunchinlech being present, of course) 
as to whether he approved, or did not approve, of the theatrical institu- 
tion known as "half-price?" The Doctor was against it. "Sir," he 
reasoned, or rather decided, "a man has no right to see half an enter- 
tainment. He should either enjoy all or none." " But, sir," objected 
Goldsmith deferentially, "supposing the entertainment to be divided 
into equal halves, both complete in themselves, has not a man a right 
to suit his pocket and his convenience, and see only one half i " " Sir, 
you are frivolous," thundered the Doctor ; " the man has but Hobson's 
choice : the second moiety of the entertainment. If he go at first 
price, he must pay whole price." " But ; sir," suggested Bozzy with a 
simper, " how would it stand, if the man coming at half-price promised 
the doorkeeper to go away punctually at nine o'clock, when the second 
price commenced ?" " Hold your tongue, sir," said Doctor Johnson, 
whereat Mr. Boswell of Auchinlech was abashed, and spake no more 
till the kindly old Doctor invited him to tea ; with blind Miss Williams 
and Mr. Levett the apothecary. 

I am sure that it must be a matter of lamentation for any man with 
a well-regulated mind to be under the necessity of disagreeing with so 
eminent an authority as Doctor Johnson — with the rough, genial, old 
bear, who had had so many sorrows of his own when young ; had danced 
upon so many hot plates, and to the very ungenteelest of tunes ; had 
been so pitilessly muzzled and baited by mangy curs, that he yet made 
it his delight in age and comparative affluence to take the young bears 
under his protection, to assuage their ursine sorrows, and lick them 
with a lumbering pity into shape. I am equally certain that few would 
even dare to differ from the scholar, critic, poet, dramatist, essayist, 



NINE P.M. — HALF-PRICE IN THE !SEW CUT. 269 

moralist, philosopher, and Christian gentleman, whose pure life and 
death in an unbelieving age are an answer for all time to the ephemeral 
brilliance of the fribble Chesterfield, the icicle Hume, the stalactite 
Gibbon, and the flasy Bristol-diamond Voltaire. Still, in the interests 
of the British drama (and assuming my anecdote to be otherwise than 
apocryphal), I must, perforce, dissent from the Doctor, and pin my 
faith to half-price. The absence of a second price is suitable enough 
for such exotic exhibitions as the Italian operas and the French plays ; 
but I deplored the suspension of that dramatic habeas corpus in the 
palmy Lyceum days of Madame Vestris's management. There is some- 
thing supercilious, pragmatical, maccaronyish, un-English, in the an- 
nouncement, " Ko half-price." How immeasurably superior is the fine 
old British placard, now, alas ! so seldom seen, " Pit full : standing- 
room only in the upper boxes !" 

There is a transpontine theatre, situated laterally towards the 
Waterloo Road, and having a northern front towards an anomalous 
thoroughfare that runs from Lambeth to Blackfriars, for which I have 
had, during a long period of years, a great esteem and admiration. 
This is the Royal Victoria Theatre, To the neophyte in London I 
frequently point out a brick erection, above the cornice of the pediment, 
and say, u My friend, in the days when the ( Vic.' (it is popularly 
termed the ' Vic.') was known as the ' Coburg,' that brick slip was 
built to contain at its rise — for it could not be rolled up — the famous 
6 Crystal curtain/ which ruined one management to construct, and half 
ruined another to demolish. The grand melodramas the Coburg used 
to give us — real horses, real armour, real blood, almost real water I" 
Those were the days of " Ginevra the Impaled One" and " Manfroni 
the One-handed Monk." There are famous dramatists, actors, scene- 
painters, who would look rather shame-faced (though I cannot see why 
they should be ashamed) were they reminded, now, of their achieve- 
ments in the service of transpontine melodrama at the Coburg. How 
stupidly absurd people are in repudiating their beginnings ! Buffel, 
the millionaire contractor, denies stoutly that he ever carried a hod, 
although hundreds of us remember him on the ladder. Linning, the 
fashionable tailor, would poison any one who told him he once kept a 
beer-shop in Lambeth Walk, and afterwards failed as a tea-dealer in 
Shoreditch. One of the most accomplished comedians of the day makes 
a point of cutting me dead, because I can recollect the time, and knew 
him, when he used to colour prints for a livelihood ; and I daresay that 



270 TWICE EOT727D THE CLOCK. 

Baron Rothschild — with all the philosophy his unbounded wealth 
should properly give him — would not ask me to dinner, if I reminded 
him that his grandfather was a pedlar in the Juden-Grasse, at Frank- 
fort. The next Tamworth baronet, I suppose, will strike the beehive 
and " Industria' out of the family escutcheon, and assume the three 
leeches sable on a field gules semee or, of his ancestors the De la Pills, 
who came over with the Conqueror as barber-chirurgeons to the ducal 
body. And yet a certain Emperor and King was not ashamed to talk 
of the period when he was a " lieutenant in the Regiment of Lafere ; " 
and the present writer, who is, on one side (the wrong), of the sangre 
azid of Spain, is not above confessing the existence of a tradition in 
his family, hinting that his maternal grandmother danced on the tight 
rope. 

Although I am a devotee of the opera, and am always glad when 
Drury Lane doors are open, and mourn over the decadence of the 
Lyceum, and wish that the Strand would succeed,* and longed for the 
day when the resuscitated Adelphi should open its doors, and rejoice at 
the prosperity of the Olympic, and think that one of the most rational 
and delightful night's amusements in Europe, may be attained by the 
sight of the " Merchant of Venice " at the now closed (so far as Charles 
Kean is concerned) Princess's, I have yet a tenderness, a predilection, 
an almost preference, for the Vic. There is a sturdy honesty of pur- 
pose, unity of action, sledge-hammer morality about the rubbishing 
melodramas, which are nightly yelled and ranted through on the Vic- 
toria stage, that are productive, I believe, of an intellectual tone, 
highly healthful and beneficial. Burkins, the garotter, who is now 
in hold in Pentonville for his sins, and is so promising a pupil of the 
chaplain, (having nearly learnt the Gunpowder Plot service and the 
prohibitions of consanguinity by heart.) has confidentially informed his 
reverend instructor that to the melodramas at the Victoria must be 
ascribed his ruin. It was the "Lonely Man of the Ocean" that led 
him to fall on Mr. Jabez Cheddar, cheesemonger, in Westminster 
Broadway, at two o'clock in the morning, split his skull open with 
a life-preserver, jump upon him, and rob him of eight pounds twelve, a 
silver hunting-watch, and a brass tobacco-box ; at which confession the 
chaplain orders him more beef and books, and puts him down in the 

* This pretty little theatre has succeeded, thanks to the genius and perseverance 
of Miss Swanborough, aided by an admirable company. 



NINE P.M. — HALF-PSICE IN THE NEW CUT. 271 

front rank for his next recommendatory report to the visiting magis- 
trates. Partaking, in company with some other persons, of the opinion 
that Burkins adds to the characteristics of a ruffian and a blockhead, 
those of a hypocrite and a Liar, I do not necessarily set much store by 
the expression of Ms opinions on the British drama. But when I find 
shrewd police-inspectors and astute stipendiary magistrates moralising 
over the dreadful effects of cheap theatres, attended as they are by the 
" youth of both sexes," I deem them foemen worthy of my steel. Good 
Mr. Inspector, worthy Master Justice, where are the youth and the 
adults of both sexes to go in quest of that amusement, which I suppose 
you will concede to them, of some nature, the necessity 1 Are the 
churches open on week nights, and to such as they ? and would you 
yourselves like to sit under Doctor Gumming, or even Mr. Spurgeon, 
from Saturday to Saturday ? Are they to go to the Opera, to Almack's, 
to the Carlton Club, or to the conversaziones of the Geological Society ? 
You object, you say, to the nature of the entertainments provided for 
them. Come with me, and sit on the coarse deal benches in the 
coarsely and tawdrily-decorated cheap theatre, and listen to the sorrily- 
dressed actors and actresses — periwigged-pated fellows and slatternly 
wenches, if you like — tearing their passion to tatters, mouthing and 
ranting, and splitting the ears of the groundlings. But in what de- 
scription of pieces 1 In dramas, I declare and maintain, in which, for 
all the jargon, silliness, and buffoonery, the immutable principles of 
right and justice are asserted ; in which virtue, in the end, is always 
triumphant, and vice is punished ; in which cowardice and falsehood 
are hissed, and bravery and integrity vehemently applauded ; in which, 
were we to sift away the bad grammar, and the extravagant action, we 
should find the dictates of the purest and highest morality. These poor 
people can't help misplacing their h's, and fighting combats of six with 
tin broadswords, They haven't been to the university of Cambridge ; 
they can't compete for the middle-class examinations ; they don't sub- 
scribe to the " Saturday Eeview ;" they have never taken dancing 
lessons from Madame Michau ; they have never read Lord Chester- 
field's Letters ; they can't even afford to purchase a " Shilling Hand- 
book of Etiquette." Which is best 1 That they should gamble in low 
coffee-shops, break each other's heads with pewter pots in public- 
houses, fight and wrangle. at street corners, or lie in wait in doorways 
and blind alleys to rob and murder, or that they should pay their 
threepence for admission into the gallery of the " Vic." — witness the 



272 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

triumph of a single British sailor over twelve armed ruffians, who are 
about to carry off the Lady Maud to outrage worse than death ; see the 
discomfiture of the dissolute young nobleman, and the restitution of the 
family estates (through the timely intervention of a ghost in a table- 
cloth) to the oppressed orphan ? And of this nature are the vast mass 
of transpontine melodramas. The very " blood-and-murder" pieces, as 
they are termed, always end with the detection of the assassin and his 
condigngpunishment. George Cruikshank's admirable moral story of 
" The Bottle" was dramatised at the "Vic," and had an immense run. 
They are performing "Never Too Late to Mend/' now, over the water, 
to crowded houses. If we want genteel improprieties, sparkling im- 
moral repartees, decorously scandalous intrigues, and artful cobwebs of 
double intendre, touching on the seventh commandment, we must cross 
the bridges and visit the high-priced, fashionably-attended theatres of 
the West-end. At a West-end theatre, was produced the only im- 
moral version of an immoral (and imbecile) "Jack Sheppard," which 
is, even now, vauntingly announced as being the "authorised version" 
— the only one licensed by the Lord Chamberlain ; and in that " au- 
thorised version" occurs the line, "Jack Sheppard is a thief, but he 
never told a lie," a declaration than which the worst dictum of howl- 
ing Tom Paine or rabid Mary Wolstoncraft was not more subver- 
sive of the balance of moral ethics. And, at a West-end theatre, 
likewise, his Lordship the Chamberlain authorised the production 
of a play, whose story, regarded either as a melodrama or as the 
libretto of a trashy Italian opera, has not been equalled for systema- 
tic immorality : no, ' not by Wilkes ; no, not by Aphra Behn : no, 
not by Crebillon the younger : no, not by Voltaire in the scandalous 
"Pucelle." 

And have I brought you all the way over Waterloo Bridge in the 
evening only to sermonise you ! I deserve to be mulcted in three times 
the halfpenny toll ; and I must make amends by saying nothing what- 
soever about the shot towers, or the Lion Brewery, the London and 
South- Western Terminus, and Hawkstone Hall. Here we are, at the 
corner of the New Cut. It is Nine o' Clock precisely (I must have flown 
rather than walked from the pawnbroker's in that lane on the Middle- 
sex side), and while the half-price is pouring into the Victoria Theatre, 
the whole-price (there is no half-price to the gallery, mind, the charge 
for the evening's entertainment being only threepence) is pouring out 
with equal and continuous persistence, and are deluging the New Cut. 



NINE P.M. — HALF -PRICE IN THE NEW CUT. 273 

Whither, you may ask, are they bound ? They are in quest of their 
Beer. 

The English have been a beer-loving people for very many ages. It 
gives them their masculine, sturdy, truculent character. Beer and beef, 
it has been before remarked, make boys. Beer and beef won the battle 
of Waterloo. Beer and beef have built railways all over the world. 
Our troops in the Crimea languished, even on beef (it was but hard 
corned junk, to be sure) till the authorities sent them beer. There is 
a lex non scripta among the labouring English, much more potent than 
many Acts of Parliament, and called the " Strong Beer Act." They 
have songs about beer with lusty " nipperkin, pipperkin, and the brown 
beer" choruses ; and in village parlours you may hear stentorian bari- 
tones, of agricultural extraction, shouting out that " Feayther likes 
his beer, he does ;" that " Sarah's passionately fond of her beer, she is ;" 
and denouncing awful vengeance upon those enemies of the people who 
would " rob a poor man of his beer." Our fingers were brought to the 
very hair-trigger of a revolution by the attempted interference of an 
otherwise well-meaning nobleman, with the people's beer ; and did not 
William Hogarth strike the right nail on the head when he drew those 
two terrible pictures of Beer Street and Gin Lane ? The authorities of 
the Victoria Theatre have preserved, I am glad to say, a wholesome 
reverence for the provisions of the Strong Beer Act, and it is, I believe, 
a clause in the Magna Charta of the management, that the performances 
on Saturday evenings shall invariably terminate within a few minutes 
of midnight, in order to afford the audience due and sufficient time to 
pour out their final libations at the shrine of Beer, before the law com- 
pels the licensed victuallers to close. 

There are not many gradations of rank among the frequenters of the 
Victoria Theatre. Many of the occupants of the boxes sat last night in 
the pit, and will sit to-morrow in the gallery, according to the fluctua- 
tion of their finances • nay, spirited denizens of the New Cut will not 
unfrequently, say on a Monday evening, when the week's wages have 
not been irremediably dipped into, pay their half-crown like men, and 
occupy seats in the private box next the stage. And the same equality 
and fraternity are manifest when the audience pour forth at half-price 
to take their beer. There may be a few cheap dandies, indeed — Cornwall 
Road exquisites and Elephant-and-Castle bucks — who prefer to do the 
" grand" in the saloon attached to the theatre; there may be some 
dozens of couples sweethearting, who are content to consume oranges, 



274 TV/ICE EOUND THE CLOCK. 

ginger beer, and Abernethy biscuits within the walls of the house ; but 
the great pressure is outwards, and the great gulf stream of this human 
ocean flows towards a gigantic " public" opposite the Victoria, and 
w T hich continually drives a roaring trade. 

I wish that I had a more savoury locality to take you to than the 
New Out. I acknowledge frankly that I don't like it. We have visited 
many queer places in London together, of which, it may be, the fashion- 
ables *of the West-end have never heard ; but they all had some out-of-the- 
way scraps of Bohemianism to recommend them. I can't say the same 
for the New Cut. It isn't picturesque, it isn't quaint, it isn't curious. 
It has not even the questionable merit of being old. It is simply Low. 
It is sordid, squalid, and, the truth must out, disreputable. The broad 
thoroughfare, which, bordered with fitting houses, would make one of 
the handsomest streets in London, is gorged w r ith vile, rotten tenements, 
occupied by merchants who oft-times pursue the very contrary to inno- 
cent callings. Everything is second-hand, except the leviathan gin- 
shops, which are ghastly in their newness and richness of decoration. 
The broad pavement presents a mixture of Vanity Fair and Rag Fair. 
It is the paradise of the lowest of costermongers, and often the saturnalia 
of the most emerited thieves. Women appear there in their most 
unlovely aspect : brazen, slovenly, dishevelled, brawling, muddled with 
beer or fractious with gin. The howling of beaten children and kicked 
dogs, the yells of ballad-singers, (: death and fire-hunters/ ' and reciters 
of sham murders and elopements ; the bawling recitations of professional 
denunciators of the Queen, the Royal family, and the ministry ; the 
monotonous jodels of the itinerant hucksters ; the fumes of the vilest 
tobacco, of stale corduroy suits, of oilskin caps, of mildewed umbrellas, 
of decaying vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously 
tapped) gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious 
mutton pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity : 
all these make the night hideous and the heart sick, The New Cut is 
one of the most unpleasant samples of London that you could offer to a 
foreigner. Bethnal Green is ragged, squalid, woe-begone, but it is 
quiet and industrious. Here, there is mingled with the poverty a 
flaunting, idle, vagabond, beggarly-fine don't-care-a-centishness. Bur- 
kins in hold in Pentonville for his sins assures the chaplain that the 
wickedness of the New Cut is due solely to the proximity of the * Wic- 
toriar Theayter, that 'aunt of disypashion and the wust of karackters." 
For my part, I think that if there were no such safety-valve as a theatre 



NINE P.M. — HALF-PRICE I>7 THE NEW CUT. 275 

for the inhabitants of the " Cut," it would become a mere Devil's Acre, a 
Cour des Miracles, a modern edition of the Whitefriars Alsatia j and that 
the Cutites would fall to plundering, quarrelling, and fighting, through 
sheer ennui. It is horrible, dreadful, we know, to have such a place; 
but then, consider — the population of London is fast advancing towards 
three millions, and the wicked people must live somewhere — under a 
strictly constitutional government. There is a despot, now, over the 
water, who would make very short work of the New Out. He would 
see, at a glance, the capacities of the place ; in the twinkling of a 
decree the rotten tenements would be doomed to destruction ; houses 
and shops like palaces would line the thoroughfare; trees would be 
planted along the pavement ; and the Boulevard de Lambeth would be 
one of the stateliest avenues in the metropolis. But Britons never 
will be slaves, and we must submit to thorns (known as " vested in- 
terests' 5 ) in the constitutional rose, and pay somewhat dear for our 
liberty as well as for our whistle. 

In the cartoon accompanying this essay, you will find a delineation 
of the hostelry — the tavern— -bah! it isn't a hostelry — it isn't a tavern ; it 
is an unadulterated gin and beer palace — whither takes place the rush at 
half-price for malt refreshment. I have kept you lingering at the door 
a long time ; I have digressed, parried, evaded the question ; discoursed 
upon the transpontine drama, and the moot question of its morality ; I 
have wandered about the H ew Cut, and have even gone back to the last 
century, and evoked the ghost of Doctor Johnson; I have been discur- 
sive, evasive, tedious very probably, but purposely so. I was bound to 
show you the place, but it is better that the pen should leave the fulness 
of representation to the pencil in this instance. It is humorous enough, 
brilliant enough, full of varied life and bustle enough. I could make 
you very merry with accounts of the mock Ethiopian serenaders at the 
door, with facetious remarks on the gentleman in the sou'-wester, knee- 
shorts, anklejacks, and gaiters, who is instructing the lady in the mob- 
cap in the mysteries of the celebrated dance known as the " Eoberto 
Polveroso," or " Dusty Bob and Black Sal." I might be eloquent upon 
the subject of the sturdy sailor who is hobnobbing with the negro, the 
Life Guardsman treating the ladies, like a gallant fellow as he is, and 
the stream of honest, hardworking mechanics, their wives, and families, 
who have surged in from the " Vic/' to have their " drop of beer." But 
the picture would still be incomplete. In graver pages- — in tedious, 
solemn journals only — could be told (and I have told, in my time) the 



276 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 




NINE P.M. — A DANCING ACADEMY. 277 

truth about a gin-shop in the New Cut. I will not descant upon 
the crime and shame, the age made hardened, the very babies weaned 
on gin. Let us take the better part, and throw a veil over this ugly 
position of the night side of London. 

Do you ever read the supplement of the " Times " newspaper 1 Of 
course you do ; at least, you must diurnally peruse one column at least 
of that succursal to the monster journal, specially interesting to your- 
self. Almost every one who can read is anxious to consult the " Times 55 
every morning for one purpose or other. Either he requires informa- 
tion about a ship that is going out, or a ship that should be come home ; 
about a purse he has lost, or a bank-note he has found ; about a situa- 
tion he wants, or a clerkship he has advertised for competition ; about 
the wife he has run away from, or the son who has run away from him ; 
about the horse he wishes to sell, or about the Newfoundland pup he 
wants to buy ; about his debtor's bankruptcy, or his own insolvency ; 
about the infallible remedy for all diseases, for which he has promised 
to send a recipe on the receipt of twelve postage-stamps ; or the best 
curative pills advertised for hypochondriasis and dyspepsia ; about the 
cheapest sherries, and the best second-hand broughams ; about piano- 
fortes for the million, sales by auction, money to be lent, or money 
wanted to borrow ; and, chiefest of all, about the " births, deaths, and 
marriages," which announcements are the prime and favourite reading 
of the female sex. Indeed, I know one lady — young, comely, accom- 
plished, good-natured, and married — who never even condescends to 
glance at a line of the colossal " Times" newspaper, beyond the " Births, 
Carriages, and Deaths ;" and very good reading she declares them to be. 

There is a portentous column to which my attention is attracted (I 
know not why, for it has never concerned me in the slightest degree), 
having reference to dancing. I don't allude to the casinos, or mas- 
querades, or public full-dress balls, to which a man may go, lounge 
about, stare at the votaries of Terpsichore, and go away again without 
ever shaking a leg ; but to the advertisements of the professors of 
dancing and " drawing-room deportment," who really mean business, 
and give instruction in those elegant and graceful arts, and hold their 
academies daily and nightly all* over London, from the farthest East to 
the extremest West. Now I am myself no dancer. I remember as a 
boy, in the grim Parisian pension, or school boarding-house attached to 
the College where I had my scant Humanities hammered into me, a 



278 TWICE EOUXD THE CEOCX. 

certain obese professor, to whom my parents and guardians paid 
certain quarterly sum for my instruction in the poetry of motion, 
remember him well, for whenever we took our walks abroad in Paris, 
we could scarcely pass a dead wall without seeing it placarded, or a 
parte cochere without seeing it hung, with a little yellow black framed 
bill, screened with a wire trellis-work, proclaiming "Boizot" and his 
u cours de dcmse" This was in '39 ; yet last winter in Paris the same 
walls and portes cocheres still sounded the praises of Boizot. He 
appears to be immortal, like Cockle of the pills, Grimstone of the eye- 
snuff, and Elizabeth Lazenby of the sauce. The square toqued and 
black-gowned professors of the College Bourbon — now Lycee Bonaparte 
— could by dint of locking me up in cellars, making me kneel across 
sharp rulers and rapping my knuckles with ferulas (for corporal 
punishment never — -oh ! never — enters into the scheme of French 
education), impel me to construe Caesar indifferently well ; but Boizot, 
in all his cours de danse, failed in teaching me the difference between 
cavalier seal and en avant deux — between the pastorale and the chaine 
des dames. A more incorrigible dunce at dancing than your humble 
servant, never, I believe, existed. In the attempt to instruct me in 
the enchanting and vertigo-giving waltz, Boizot made a most lamentable 
fiasco, although he resorted to his famous specific of stamping on the 
pupil's toes with heavy-heeled shoes till he made the right steps to the 
right time. But our gyrations always ended in my doing all my 
waltzing on his toes ; and he flung me away from him at last, de- 
nouncing me as a hopeless hator, ganache, cretin, and carter e — a Vandal, 
a Goth, an Ostrogoth, and a Visigoth — the three first being terms per- 
fectly comprehensible to the French schoolboy, but for which it is 
difficult to find equivalents in this language. I am sure that Boizot 
left me with the utmost dislike and contempt, and with the most 
sinister forebodings for my future career. Thenceforth I was released 
from the dancing-lessons. In after years, I have heard it reported on 
good authority that I once danced a hornpipe at the wedding-breakfast 
of a maritime relation of mine ; but the exploit, if ever accomplished, 
was due more, I opine, to the salmon and cucumber of the nuptial 
feast than to the certaminis gaudia of dancing. I essayed seriously 
once more to waltz at a Kursaal ball at a German watering-place. 
How I tore a lady's dress, how I tripped myself up, how I was covered 
with shame, and had the finger of scorn pointed at me, are yet matters 
of history at Bubbelbingen Schlaggasenberg. Thither I will return no 



NINE P. 31. — A DAXCING ACADEMY. 279 

more. Again, ^hen I visited Russia, the first letter of introduction I 
presented on my arrival at St. Petersburg brought nie an invitation to 
a grand ball. It was — Ob, horror ! a diplomatic ball ; there were not 
half a dozen persons in plain clothes in the ball-room ; and I stood 
lonely and forlorn among a crowd of brilliant guardsmen, be-starred 
and be-ribboned ministers, plenipotentiaries, and embroidered attaches, 
who are proverbially the best dancers in Europe. I had not even the 
miserable safety-valve of crossing over and* talking to the non-dancing 
dowagers, for, according to Russian custom — one which would delight 
the irreverent Air. Spurgeon — the ladies remain at one end of the salon, 
and the gentlemen at the other — a relic of Orientalism — and in strict 
isolation, during the intervals between the dances. I was in despair, 
and about either to rush out or to recite " ITy name is In orval," with a 
view towards exciting curiosity and inspiring terror, when the gracious 
lady who did the honours for the ball-giving minister, who was a 
bachelor, asked me if I didn't dance ? I didn't say that I had a 
sprained ankle, that I was hot, or tired, but I told the truth for once, 
and said honestly that I couldn't. u Don't you smoke, then 1 '' she con- 
tinued, glancing at me with a sort of pitying expression, as though she 
were thinking, "I wonder what this gawky Englishman can do?" I 
replied that I ccuid smoke a little ; whereupon, with her own fair 
hands, she opened a door and inducted me to an apartment, where a 
score of Boyards and secretaries of legation were smoking Havannahs, 
playing preference, and sipping whisky-punch, and where I stopped 
till two o'clock in the morning, became very popular, and positively 
sang a comic song. At evening parties in England, alas ! they 
seldom have a smoking-room, and so I don't go to them. A non- 
dancing man becomes speedily known in society, and the women shun 
him. 

I can't help thinking (of course, on the fox and sour grapes 
principle), whenever I see a very accomplished male dancer, as when I 
look upon a first-rate amateur billiard-player, on the immense amount 
of time the man must have wasted to accjuire a useless and frivolous 
art. Yet I remember the fox and the grapes, and suppress my rising 
sneer. Dancing to those who like it, and can dance gracefully, is an 
innocent and cheerful recreation. It does my heart good sometimes to 
see the little tiny children in our crowded London courts and alleys 
waltzing and polkaing to the Italian organ-grinder's music ; and I 
shall be sorry for the day when some new Oliver Cromwell or Puritan 



280 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

government — we may have another in time — may denounce and put 
down "public dancing and dancing academies." 

But why should the dancing academy column in the " Times " 
advertisements possess more than general attractions for me ? Is it 
that I have a sneaking inclination to visit one of these establishments 
as a pupil ; take six private lessons from Miss Leonora Geary, or Mrs. 
Nicholas Henderson — I could never dare to face Madame Melanie 
Duval, or the Semiramis of dancing mistresses, Madame Michau Ade- 
laide — study the fashionable steps in secret, and then burst upon the 
world as an adept in the Schottische, the Cellarius, and the Deux 
Temps ? Alas ! I do not even know the names of the fashionable dances 
of the day, and very probably those to which I have alluded are by 
this time old fashioned, out of date, rococo, and pigtaily. But I have 
a theory that every man must dance before he dies, and that of the 
choregraphic art we may say as of love — 

" Whoe'er thou art, thy master see, 
"Who is, or was, or is to be." 

And I shall dance, I suppose, some of these days, although my nerves 
be shrunk, my blood be cold, and hair white, and Death scrape away 
on the fiddle, as in Hans Holbein's shudder-giving panorama. 

Mr. William M'Connell, however, the young gentleman who is my 
artistic fides achates in this horological undertaking, is, I am given to 
understand, a complete master of this desirable accomplishment, and 
a finished adept in its various mysteries. In this case, therefore, the 
leader has become the led, and I am grateful to him for his service as 
cicerone in introducing me to the domains of Terpsichore. 

Assume, reader and spectator — to violate no academical privacy — 
that we are in the salle de danse conducted for so many years, and with 
so much success, by Mrs. Hercules Fanteague, late of the Royal Operas. 
Throughout each day, from morn till dewy eve, does Mrs. Fanteague — 

a little woman, who, at no remote period of time, has been pretty 

assisted by her husband, Mr. Hercules Fanteague, a diminutive gentle- 
man, with tight pantaloons and a " kit," and a numerous family of sons 
and daughters, who all appear to have been born dancing-masters and 
mistresses, give private instruction to ladies and gentlemen, who are as 
yet novices in the art, or who are too shame-faced to venture upon the 
ordeal of public instruction. But, at nine o'clock in the evening, com- 
mences the public academy — the "hop," as some persons, innocent of 



NINE P. INI. A DANCING ACADEMY. 



281 




282 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

the bump of veneration, call it. There, in the tastefully yet cheaply 
decorated saloon, with its boarded floor and flying cupids and sylphides 
on the panels— there, where the gas shines, and the enlivening strains of 
a band, composed of a harp,, piano, and violin, are heard — there, in a 
remote section of the apartment — the pons asinorum of the dancing- 
school — the adult gentlemen, who are as yet in the accidence or rudi- 
ments of dancing, are instructed in the mysteries of the "positions' 7 
and preliminary steps by Mrs. Hercules Fanteague. The dancing- 
mistress is obliged to be very firm and decided, not to say severe, with 
her awkward pupils ; for some are inclined to blush, and some to laugh 
and whisper disparaging jokes to one another, and some to tie their legs 
into knots and imitate the action of the old shutter telegraphs with 
their arms, and some to sink into a state of stony immobility and semi- 
unconsciousness, from which they can only be rescued by sharp words 
and pushes. When these hopeful ones are sufficiently advanced in the 
elements, they are handed over to lady partners, who, to the sound of 
the aforesaid harp, piano, and violin, twirl them about the room till 
they are pronounced fit /to figure in the soirees of society, and in the 
Arabian Night-like scenes of Cremorne and Highbury Barn. 

I once heard a man of the world tell a lady, in gay reproach, that 
there were three things impossible of accomplishment to her sex, 
" Women can't throw, 5 ' he said, u they can't jump, and they can't 
slide." The lady stoutly denied the third postulate, and adduced in 
proof her own sliding performances in winter time in the day-room at 
boarding school. The first assertion she settled by throwing the peel- 
ing of an apple at him, which fell deftly over his left shoulder, and 
formed on the carpet, I am told, the initials of her Christian name. 
However this may be with other ladies — for she was fair, and good, and 
wise, as " Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother," though Time has not 
thrown a dart at her yet, I know there is one thing a man cannot do. 
He cannot dance. He may take lessons of Mrs. Hercules Fanteague 
till his hair groves out of his hat, and his nails grow out of his pumps ; 
he may dance the Crystal Platform at Cremorne to sawdust, but he will 
never succeed in making himself more than a capering elephant, or an 
ambling hippopotamus, with the facial expression of an undertaker's 
man on duty for the funeral of a very rich " party," where extra woe is 
laid on by Mr. Tressels, regardless of expense. 

Of course I except professional dancers, and I bow reverentially 
before the bust of Yestris, " Diou cle la Danse" and of the late Mr. 



NINE P. 31. — A DANCING ACADEMY. 233 

Baron Nathan. I do not remember the first. He died years before I 
was born, yet I see him in my mind's eye on the stage of the Grand 
Opera in Paris, swelling with peacock-pride and conscious merit — in 
ing — in full court-dress, his sword by his side, his laced and 
plumed chapeau bras beneath his arm, his diamond solitaire in his 
laced shirt-frill, leading his son to the footlights, on the night of the 
first appearance of the youth, and saying, " Allez, my son, the Muses 
will protect you, and your father beholds you." Was it this son, or a 
grandson? — tell me " Notes and Queries" — that was the Armand 
Vestris, whom our Eliza Bartolozzi (the famous Madame Vestris) mar- 
ried, and who was hurried at that dreadful hole at Naples 1 I see the 
Dion de la Danse on a subsequent occasion at rehearsal, w r hen the same 
son, beicg committed to the prison as Fort l'Eveque by the lieutenant 
of police (the w r hole operatic troupe, led by Mademoiselle Guimard, 
were in a state of chronic revolt) dismissed him with these magnanim- 
ous words : " Allez, my beloved one. This is the proudest day of your 
life. Demand the apartments of my friend the King of Poland. Take 
my carriage. Your father pays for all ! " But the poor baron, with 
his corkscrew ringlets, turn-down collar, and limber legs, I can and do 
remember. I have seen him dance that undying pas, blindfold, among 
the eggs and tea-things, in the Gothic Hall at Rosherville. But five 
Sundays since I was at Gravesend, and over my shilling tea in the 
Gothic Hall, I sighed when I thought of Baron Nathan and of happier 
days. " Where art thou, my Belinda ? There is no one to pull off 
my shrimp-heads now." 

Lo, as I pen these reminiscences of nine o'clock in the evening- 
pen them in the "quiet street," where I am again for a season — 
though my boat is on the shore, and my bark is on the sea, and ere 
you hear from me again there w r ill be a considerable variation of clocks 
between London and Jericho— a fife and tabour announce the advent of 
a little dancing boy and girl, with a careworn mother, in the street 
below. I look from my window, and see the little painted people 
capering in their spangles and fleshings and short calico drawers. It 
is against conviction, and against my own written words, and against 
political economy, and ex-Lord Mayor Carden ; but I think on Mr. 
Carrick's picture of "Weary Life," and must needs take some pence 
from the clock-case, and throw them out to these tiny mummers. 
Life is so hard, my brother! 



284 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 



TEN O'CLOCK P.M.-A DISCUSSION AT THE " BELVIDERE," 
AND AN ORATORIO AT EXETER HALL. 

Exists there, in the whole world, civilised or uncivilised, a nation of 
such inveterate grumblers as the English ? We grumble at everything. 
We are five-and-twenty millions of bears afflicted with perpetually sore 
heads. Are we charged sixpence extra for a bed ? is the tail of our 
mutton-chop underdone ? does our mockturtle soup disagree with us % 
is a railway train late ? or the requisite amount of hop deficient in our 
pale ale ? does an Italian itinerant split our ears while we are endeavour- 
ing to solve the Seventh Problem in the First Book of Euclid % does the 
editor or manager refuse to return the manuscript of our poems or our 
farces % do we buy a silk dress that turns out to be nine-tenths cotton ? 
are we surcharged by the commissioners of income-tax, {they say I make 
a thousand a year, I say I don't make a hundred and fifty ; but may 
difference of opinion never, et cetera) ? forthwith we call for pen, ink, 
and paper, and indite a letter to the " Times," that providential safety- 
valve for the great legion of grumblers. What are our public meetings 
but organised arenas of grumbling ? what the " leaders" in our Sunday 
newspapers but extra facilities for grumbling after we have been 
grumbling all the week i I think it was Mr. Horace Mayhew, in his 
" Model Men and Women," who told the story of a waiter at a city 
tavern, who took but one holiday in the course of the year, and then 
enjoyed himself by paying a visit to another waiter at another tavern, 
and assisting him in laying the knives and forks. In like manner the 
ordinarily-understood holiday for the gentlemen of the daily press — 
there being no diurnals published on Sunday — is Saturday • whereupon, 
after lying in bed somewhat longer than usual on the sixth day's morn- 
ing, they indulge in the dulce desipere in loco, by writing stinging 
leading articles in the journals which publish editions on the Sabbath. 
This is due to their inveterate propensity for grumbling. And, mark 
me, this licensed and acknowledged grumbling is the surest safeguard 
of our liberties, and the safest guarantee for our not drifting from our 
snug roadstead of constitutionalism, where we can ride at anchor, and 
smile at the timid argosies and caravels of despotism, moored and chained 
in the grim granite basins of the inner port, and all without launching 



TEN P.M. A DISCUSSION AT THE " BELYIDERE. 285 

into the troubled oceans, full of breakers and white squalls, of utter 
democracy. We seize upon a wrong, and grumble at it, till, after a few 
months', and sometimes a few years' grumbling, we find that the wrong 
exists no more, and that we have gained another Right. But we have 
had no barricades ad interim, no fusillades, no bombardment of private 
houses, no declarations of the " solidarity " of anybody, no confiscations, 
no deportations, and no guillotinings. Our rulers, grown wise by ex- 
perience of smashed windows, pelted heads, and occasional (when the 
people were very hard driven) political annihilation, and hurling into 
the limbo of red tapism, have of late years placed few or no restrictions 
upon grumbling. The noble lord at the head of the Government daily 
receives deputations, who grumble at his measures, or at the measures 
he won't guarantee to propose, fearfully. In the Parliament House, no 
sooner does our gracious Queen, in her silver bell-like voice, speak the 
. speech that others have written down for her (I daresay she could write 
a much more sensible discourse herself), than Lords and Commons begin 
to grumble about the sense of her words, and move amendments to the 
address which is to be presented to her. Downstairs, all through the 
session, parliamentary committees are grumbling at witnesses, and wit- 
nesses are grumbling at the committee ; and in outlying boroughs vicious 
electors are grumbling at the members of the Commons' House of Par- 
liament. The country newspapers and the London newspapers grumble. 
The barristers grumble at the judge, and the judge at the jury. The 
public grumbles at the way soldiers are treated by the officers, and the 
soldiers (who are about the only citizens who are not addicted to 
grumbling) go out and fight and win battles, at which we at home 
grumble, because so many lives have been lost. And I daresay the 
Prime Minister grumbles because he has the gout, and the Queen on ■ 
her throne grumbles because ec Punch " caricatures the Prince Consort, 
and " Punch " grumbles because the Prince Consort does not often 
enough give occasion to be grumbled at. I grumble at being obliged 
to write for your amusement, and you grumble because I am not half 
amusing enough. We grumble at the cold dinners at school, at the 
price of the marriage license, at the doctor's bill for our first child's 
measles, at the cost of the funeral of Uncle John, who left us all his 
money. We grumble because we have to live, and grumble when the 
physician tells us that we must die. Does it not all resolve itself into 
our purer, better Fielding's aphorism in " Vanity Fair" — " Ah ! 
vanitas vanitatum ? Who of us has not his hobby, or, having it, i3 



286 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

satisfied ? '■ Yet there is mush virtue in having at least liberty to 
grumble. 

These thoughts come over me as I wend my way at Ten o' Clock at 
night along the New Road — what do they call it now 1 ? Euston Road, 
Pan eras Road, Paddington Road — que scais-je — towards the suburban 
district of Pentonville. It w r on't be suburban much longer ; for Clerk- 
enwell and Islington, Somers Town and Finsbury, are hemming it in 
so closely that it will be engulphed some of these days by a brick-and- 
mortar torrent, like the first Eddystone Lighthouse. A pleasant spot 
once was Pentonville, haunted hj cheery memories of Sir Hugh Myddle- 
ton, the New River Head, Sadlers' Wells Theatre, and the " Angel " at 
Islington- — w r hich isn't (at least now-a-days, and I doubt if it ever was) 
at Islington at all. They began to spoil Pentonville when they pulled 
down that outrageously comic statue of George IV., at Battle Bridge. 
Then they built the Great Northern Railway Terminus — clincher 
number one ; then an advertising tailor built a parody of the Crystal 
Palace for a shop — clincher number two (I am using a Swivellerism). 
The pre-ordinate clincher had been the erection of the hideously lugu- 
brious penitentiary. However, I suppose it is all for the best. The 
next step will be to brick up the reservoir, and take down that mysterious 
tuning-fork looking erection, which no doubt has something to do with 
the water supply of London, and the New River Head ; then they had 
better turn the Angel into a select vestry-room or a meeting-house for 
the Board of Works ; and then, after that, I should advise them to de- 
molish the se Belvidere." 

Whose connection with grumbling you shall very speedily under- 
stand. At this famous and commodious old tavern, one of the few in 
London that yet preserve, not only a local but a metropolitan reputa- 
tion, there is held every Saturday evening—ten o'clock being about the 
time for the commencement of the mimic Vv r ittenagemotte — one of those 
meetings for political discussion, and the " ventilation " of political 
questions, whose uninterfered with occurrence, not only here, but in 
Fleet Street, in Bride Lane, and in Leicester Square, so much did rouse 
the ire of the sbirri, and mouchards, and unutterable villany of Rue de 
Jerusalem spydom, in the employ of his Imperial Majesty, Napoleon 
III. 

I have run the gauntlet of most of these harmless symposia of 
political talk ; and with all, save the Westminster Forum, I can claim 
acquaintance. I have been one of the Alumni of " Cogers" or " Codger's" 



TEX P.M. A DISCUSSION AT THE " EEEYIDEKE. 287 

Hall, Bride Lane, where the gentleman who occupied the chair was ad- 
dressed as " My Noble Grand" by the speaker. I have attended a 
meeting at the Forum, held at the Green Dragon,* Fleet Street, where 
visitors are invited to join in the discussion ; and where, one evening, 
joining in the discussion as a stranger, the meeting objected to my 
political views, and a vote passed the chair that I was to be thrown out 
of the window ; from which ignominious exodus I was only rescued by 
the advent of a friendly Templar, who had dropped in from chambers 
to the Forum to oil his rusty eloquence in time for the coming Western 
Circuit. I have dropped in, too, occasionally, at Mr. Wyld's Reading- 
Boom, in Leicester Square, and have listened to much drouthy elo- 
quence on subjects home and foreign. But nowhere have I seen such 
tableaux as the governmental journals of Paris have depicted, in the 
gloomiest of colours, as images of the political discussion meetings of 
perjfide Albion. Nowhere have I seen a bowl of blood on the table, the 
chairman sitting on a barrel of gunpowder — to be subsequently used 
for the conflagration of the Thames— the orator addressing his hearers 
from the summit of a pile of ball-cartridges erected on a coffin ; or dis- 
sentient members launching obuses, charged with fulminating mercury, 
at an unpopular speaker's head. Dark and dangerous meetings, of 
dark and dangerous men, do certainly take place in London. Oppressed, 
despairing, starving, outlawed, outraged exiles, do meet in holes and 
corners, do plot and conspire, do hurl, in speech, denunciation and 
sarcasm, at despots. But you must not go to Fleet Street, to Bride 
Lane,- to Leicester Square, nor, least of all, to Pentonvilie, to find them. 
The doors of those mysterious meeting-places are "tiled" as securely as 
Freemasons' lodges. Now and then a traitor, by lies and hypocrisy, 
gains admittance, but woe to the traitor if he be discovered in his 
treason. He dies within the year. 

The "Belvidere" is distinguished above its kindred discussion halls, 
by its eminently respectable aspect. The subjects broached are bold 
enough, and are as boldly treated j but you are puzzled to reconcile the 
full-blown democracy of some of the speakers, with their mild, bank- 
account-possessing, rate-and-tax-paying, housekeeping appearance. They 

- : - There is a curious story anent this " Green Dragon" tavern, a dim record, 
embosomed in the musty records of the Ci State Trials." In a note to one of those 
chronicles' of crimes and suffering, it is hinted at that the daughter of the execu- 
tioner of Charles the First was a barmaid at the Green Dragon in the reign of 
Queen Anne. 



288 



TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK, 




TEN P.M. — A DISCUSSION AT THE " BELYIDEBE. 289 

bark but do not bite. The usages and prestige of the place, too, demand 
a certain amenity in discussion and forbearance in reply, which throws 
an extra tinge of respectability over the whole. Looking at this spa- 
cious, handsome room, panelled and pillared, comfortably and brilliantly 
lit, with its doubled rows of mahogany tables covered with bottles and 
glasses full of steaming compounds that do comfort the flesh outwardly 
and rejoice the spirit inwardly- — in strict moderation, mind ; looking at 
this burly, substantial auditory, ensconced in their cosy chairs, smoking 
their cigars, and listening with attentive ears to the orator ; looking at 
the thoughtful waiter slipping from table to table, administering re- 
freshment and receiving orders with a subtle swiftness, yet taking, I 
will be bound, an ardent mental interest in the discussion ; looking at 
the grave chairman in his comfortable high-raised fauteuil — you might 
fancy this to be one of the parochial " representative councils," as ves- 
tries are now queerly christened, or a freemasons' lodge, when, " labour" 
being over, " refreshment" commences, or an ordinary club of middle- 
class men accustomed to meet one another, and talk upon the topics of 
the day over a social glass. And, in truth, were you to suppose this, 
you would not be so very far out in your calculation. These are, in- 
deed, vestrymen— or representative councillors — freemasons, benefit-club, 
middle-class men. But the topic of the night is invested with autho- 
rity, and its discussion is subject to rules ; and the highest compliment 
I can pay to the "Belvidere" is that, if in that other Discussion Hall, 
held between the months of Harch and August, in a green-leather and 
oak-carving furnished chamber, nigh unto the crypt of St. Stephen's 
Chapel, Westminster, as much sobriety, decorum, and persistence in 
adhering to the matter in hand were shown, as in this convivial parlia- 
ment, the business of the nation would progress much better, and we 
should have much less cause to grumble at most things. 

See a speaker on his legs — a fluent speaker, somewhat of a florid 
speaker, occasionally somewhat of a violent speaker, though his violence 
is strictly confined to words and gesticulations. Vv 7 hat withering sar- 
casms he hurls at kings and ministers ! How eloquently he tells those 
tyrannical puppets that, when they are forgotten, when the force and 
direction of personal satire is no longer understood, aud measures are 
felt only in their remotest consequences, his words shall still be found 
to contain principles worthy of being transmitted to posterity ! How 
sneeringly he assures our rulers that they have but a copyhold interest 
in the state, that they cannot waste, that they cannot alienate, and that 



290 TWICE EOTTND THE CLOCK. 

the fee-simple is in us ! How menacingly lie assures the monarchs of 
the earth that the crowns which were gained by one revolution may be 
lost by another ! and how much, listening to his impassioned exordium, 
to his whirlwind argument, to his scathing peroration, I become im- 
pressed with a notion that the orator has a capital memory, and has 
been an assiduous student of certain letters, which were addressed, in 
our great-grandmothers' time, to Mr. Woodfall, the printer of the 
" Public Advertiser,'' by a mysterious correspondent — a correspondent 
whose motto was, " Stat nominis umbra? and who chose to assume the 
pseudonym of "Junius." 

In these orations you are sure to hear a good deal about Catholic 
Emancipation, the Test and Corporation Acts, the Spa Fields Riots, 
the'Peterloo Massacre, the " Piccadilly Butchers," the "Dorsetshire 
Labourers," Queen Caroline's Trial, Richmond the Spy, and similar 
topics. They are not very amusing, perhaps, but they are of infinite 
service in keeping juvenile politicians au fait with the political mem- 
orabilia of thirty or forty years since. I have even heard an ardent 
reformer, with scarcely so much as a tuft on his chin, declaim in burn- 
ing accents upon the great case of Home Tooke versus the House of 
Commons — " Once a priest forever a priest" — on Ja f ck Wilkes, Num- 
ber Forty-five, and the question of general warrants, on the cruelty of 
Lord Ellenborough to William Hone, the trial of Colonel Despard, and 
the eventualities which might have followed the successful assassination 
of Lord Sidmouth by Arthur Thistlewood. 

A staid, middle-aged gentleman follows the reformer, and proceeds, 
genteelly, to demolish him. He is a staunch upholder of our ancient 
institutions, and sneers at the presumptuous and levelling tendencies of 
the age. He has some neat things to say about the " Pig and Whistle" 
style of oratory, at which the ardent reformer winces, chews the end of 
his cigar, and empties his glass indignantly ; and he concludes with a 
glowing eulogium on church and state, our glorious constitution, and 
our noble aristocracy. 

Ere I leave these placid tribunes of Pentonville Hill, discharging 
their harmless philippics at men high in place and power, I muse a 
little over the tavern itself, and call to mind a certain story I once heard 
respecting it, possessing what foundation of truth I know not, but 
which, if not true, is assuredly ben trovato. Thus runs the dubious 
legend : You remember the fair young daughter of England, the good 
princess, the virtuous daughter of a wicked father, and in whom, from 



TEN P. INI. A DISCUSSION AT THE " EELVIDE&E. 291 

her cradle to her marriage, the hope and lore of this stolid but strong- 
feeling nation were centred. You remember her husband : he is a king 
at Brussels now. You remember how, when she died, all England 
burst into a passionate lament ; how thousands went into voluntary 
mourning ; how clergymen wept in the pulpit, when they discoursed on 
her virtues ; how an awful darkness and despair seemed to overshadow 
the ill-governed land when the news came that the Princess Charlotte 
was dead. There is little need to say that her husband (who, I am 
glad to believe, loved her very truly and fondly) was at first inconsolable 
for her loss, and grieved long and bitterly for her. But time was good 
to him, and heaven merciful, and by degrees his sorrow wore away. 
Still he was melancholy, pre-occupied, and loved nothing so much as to 
be left alone. It was about this time that the then landlord of the Bel- 
videre began to notice that about eleven o'clock almost every forenoon 
during the week a gentleman in deep mourning, and on horseback, 
would stop at the door of the tavern, leave his horse in charge of his 
groom, enter the large room, call for a pipe and a pint of ale, and 
quietly enjoy those refreshments for about the space of one hour. The 
room would be at that early hour of the day almost deserted. The 
one or two tradesmen who would occasionally drop in for a crust of 
bread and cheese, and a peep at the " Times,' 7 would be bidden a civil 
" good morning" — in a slightly foreign accent— by the stranger; but 
he never entered into conversation ; he never read the newspaper ; he 
" kep hisself to hisself," the waiter said. But he was so punctual and 
so regular in his attendance, that the people of the house came to look 
out for his daily visit in his suit of sables, and a special pipe was 
laid, a special dish of tobacco prepared, and a special chair and spittoon 
arranged, every day for his use. So things went on for many weeks ; 
till one luckless morning, just after the departure of the black horse- 
man, a customer of the house — I believe he was a commercial traveller, 
who had just returned from a journey in the west of England, and who 
had been enjoying his pipe and pint in the society of the taciturn 
stranger— called the landlord on one side. 

" Do you know who that chap is 1 " he asked. 

". Not a bit," answered the host. " Comes here every morning 
regular. Pint of mild sixpenny ; bird's-eye ; gives the waiter twopence, 
and goes away. Groom has a glass of ale sitting on his horse. Pays 
his way like a gentleman." 

" He's somebody," said the commercial traveller, significantly. 



202 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

" So I should think," returned the landlord, quietly. 

" He's a high fellow/' added the bagman, mysteriously. 

" I shouldn't wonder," said the landlord, tranquilly. 

" Why, bless your heart, man alive!" broke out, impatiently, his 
interlocutor, " can't you guess who he is ? He's Prince Leopold of 
Saxe-Coburg. I have seen his Royal Highness a hundred times, and 
know him by sight as well as I do you." 

The next forenoon, when the sable horseman arrived, he found a 
roll of crimson baize laid down from the pales before the travern to the 
doorway, which was lined by American aloes in tubs. The staircase 
was freshly carpeted ; in the stranger's customary place was a table 
covered with a crimson cloth, backed by a crimson chair with gilt legs. 
The landlady, her daughter, and the barmaid, were all in holiday attire, 
and when the unknown rang the bell, the landlord himself, in a blue 
coat and brass buttons, and his hair newly powdered, brought him 
the beer in a silver tankard, and a wax candle at which to light his 
pipe. The black horseman said nothing, drank his ale, and smoked 
his tobacco, paid his reckoning, made his way downstairs amidst a 
profusion of bows and curtsies, mounted his horse, and — never came 
again. So runs the legend. The commercial traveller may have been 
wrong in his assertion, or may have been hoaxing the landlord ; but I 
incline to the belief that this was really Prince Leopold. Why not? 
The incident is trifling enough ; yet there is something touching in 
the picture of the good-natured young German brooding over his be- 
reavement, yet consoling himself in the simple German fashion, over 
his pipe and beer. 

Friend of mine, if you have the slightest hope or thought that 
whither I am now taking thee is one of the gay and merry scenes of 
London night-life, prithee dismiss the thought, for thou art in error. 
Prithee pull up the collar of thy coat, stiffen thy neckcloth as much as 
possible, take that wicked cigar from thy mouth, cast down thine eyes, 
and assume a decorum, if thou have it not. We are going to Exeter 
Hall. 

Don't be alarmed : this is not the month of May or the season for 
meetings in aid of missions to the Quashiboos, the Rumbatumbas, or 
the Oolalooloo cannibals. We are not going to hear John B. Gough 
lecture on temperance. We are going to hear an oratorio, conducted 
by Mr. Costa — an oratorio in which Mr. Sims Reeves, Mr. Weiss, Miss 



TEN P.M. AN OEATOEIO AT EXETER HALL. 293 

Dolby, and Madame Clara Novello, are to sing — and to listen to a band 
and chorus brought to a degree of perfection which only the genius of 
such a conductor could insure, or the gigantic resources of the Sacred 
Harmonic Society command. 

There would seem to be in an oratorio something essentially germane 
to the English mind and character. The sounding recitative and 
swelling hymns, the rolling choruses and triumphant bursts of 
exultant music, have a strange affinity with the solemn, earnest, 
energetic English people, slow to move to anger or to love, but, 
when moved, passionately enthusiastic in their love, bloody and 
terrible in their great wrath. The French can no more understand 
oratorios than they can understand blank verse. I remember going to 
see Mendelssohn's i{ Elijah" once in Paris. It was winter time, and the 
performances took place in Franconi's great, windy, for-summer-built 
horse-riding circus in the Champs Elysees. The band and chorus 
shivered as they scraped and sang ; the prima donna 's nose and lips 
were blue, and the music paper quivered in her hand ; the contralto 
looked exquisitely uncomfortable at not having to wear a page's dress 
and show her legs. As for the audience, the ladies sat muffled up in 
shawls and furs — it was a morning performance — and whispered 
among themselves ; the men sucked the knobs of their canes, twirled 
their moustaches, stared up at the chandeliers, and murmured, Quelle 
drole de musique ! They didn't repeat that oratorio, and I don't 
wonder at it. To the French it was neither fish nor flesh, neither 
ecclesiastical nor secular. If the first, they might argue, give us the 
chanting priests, the swinging censers dispensing fragrant clouds, the 
red-cassocked altar boys, the twinkling tapers, the embroidered 
canopies, and the swelling paeans of the concealed choristers. If the 
last, let us have a drinking chorus, a laughing chorus, and a dagger 
chorus, a prima donna to make her entrance on horseback, a con- 
tralto in tights, a ballet in the second act, and some red fire at the 
end. But this is neither mass nor opera. 

They think differently in England. To the seriously-inclined 
middle classes the oratorio supplies the place of the opera. And it 
behoves you to consider what a vast power in the state those serious 
middle-class men and women are. It is all very well for us, men and 
citizens of the world, yet living in a comparatively contracted circle of 
acquaintances as cosmopolitan as ourselves ; it is all very w r ell for us, 
who see " no harm " in sitting at home and reading the newspaper, 



294 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

while our wives go to church ; who support Sunday bands, Sunday 
steamboats, and Sunday excursion trains, and are agitating now for the 
opening of museums, and galleries, and palaces on the Sabbath j who 
talk lightly on serious topics, and call clergymen parsons ; it is all very 
well, I say, for us, travelled, and somewhat cynical as we may be, to 
pretend that the " serious " world is an amalgam of bigotry, hypocrisy, 
and selfishness, and to ignore the solemn religious journals that 
denounce hot dinner on Sundays, or a walk after it, or the perusal 
of a secular book on the sacred day, as intolerable sins, Yet how 
many thousands; — how many millions — of sober, sincere, conscien- 
tious citizens are there, who are honestly persuaded of the sin- 
fulness of many things which we consider harmless recreations ! 
who would shrink back in horror, if they heard a tithe of the conver- 
sations that go on every night in hundreds of well-conducted London 
drawing-rooms ! who look upon dancing as an irreligious and Baby- 
lonish pastime ! whose only light reading consists of tracts, missionary 
chronicles, and memoirs of sainted cheesemongers, and the beatified 
daughters of dairymen ! I declare that I never see a theatre in a 
country town— where, at least, tw r o- thirds of the population consist of 
such as I have described — -without wondering at the lunacy of the 
person who built it, without marvelling at the idiocy of every fresh 
speculator who enters on the management. We may pretend to despise 
the Puritan world, write books and farces against them, and quiz the 
"Record" or the " Wesleyan ; " but it is folly to ignore the vast 
numerical strength of these same Puritans. They purchase such books 
as " Memorials of Captain Headly Vicars " by thousands ; they 
subscribe thousands of pounds yearly in an almost insane hope of con- 
verting heathen barbarians to a better faith ; they give away millions 
of tracts ; they flood the platform and the auditory of every public 
meeting. It won't do to ignore them. Cromwell's Ironsides and Sir 
Harry Vane's Fifth-Monarchy Men have made too deep a mark upon 
the people of England to be lightly passed over. 

But the serious world, and that section who are worldly, meet on 
neutral ground at an Exeter Hall oratorio. The religionists see no 
sin in listening to sacred music ; the mundane come to listen with 
delight to the immortal strains of Handel, of Haydn, and of Mendel- 
ssohn. Ci When shall their glory fade " asked Tennyson, singing of the 
Six Hundred at Balaclava. When shall the glory of our great oratorio 
writers decay ? Never — I hope. 



TEN P.M.— AN ORATORIO AT EXETEE HALL. 295 

A resident at Bethlehem Hospital — he wasn't either a doctor or a 
keeper, but wore, habitually, a strait-waistcoat, took shower-baths very 
frequently, and kept his head close shaved — once divided the world into 
two classes : people who were mad, and people who would be mad. I, 
too — but out of Bedlam, thank heaven ! — have made a somewhat analo- 
gous classification. I divide the world into people who have and have 
not seen Ghosts. I belong myself to the first class. I am continually 
seeing ghosts. I shake hands in the street withfriends who have been 
dead these ten years. A dear dead sister comes and sits by me at night 
when I read, and tells me, with a kiss, that I am a good boy for coining 
home so early. I was troubled some years ago with a man with his 
head off, who, in that unseemly position, and holding his head on his 
knees, sat continually before me. I dismissed him at last as being an 
unworthy hallucination, and not a genuine ghost, I meet a good many 
ghosts now — -friendly ghosts, pleasant ghosts- — but chiefly do they 

ur me with their company at places of public entertainment. It 
may be that I am a bad listener to music or theatrical dialogue, that 
I am absent in mind, and distrait ; but so surely as I go to a theatre or 
concert, so surely do I fall a conjuring up mind-n; ill the theatre 

or the hall, and its occupants, quite fade away. : ind myself in 

entirely different company to people who are mouldering in 

their graves, or who are thousands of miles away, 

And so the oratorio goes on, the assemblage paying a grave and 
decorous attention to the music, and be?.'. ir more like a 

congreg?ttion than an audience. They are so devotedly rapt in the 
magnificent performance, that I expect every moment to hear the vast 
mass of them join in the choruses ; and when, at the first bar of the 
sublime " Hallelujah Chorus," the hearers all stand up, the singers in 
the orchestra seem to me like priests, In truth, I think that to hear 
an oratorio, chastens and purifies the mind, and that we go away from 
those grand performances wiser and better men. There is a natural 
disinclination to return — at least, immediately — to frivolous and trivial 
pursuits, after listening to those solemn and ennobling strains. I know 
that some exist upon whom music has no effect whatsoever ; but I 
believe that the vast majority of mankind are influencec! for o-ood or 
evil by the sound of music. The most heartless woman in the world 
whom I know, cries when she hears " Kathleen ma voumeen." Xapo- 
leon could never listen to "JLascio cliio piango la cruda sorted without 
crossing himself. How grandly does John Dryden set forth this theory 



296 



TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK, 




ELEVEN P.M. — A SCIENTIFIC CONVEKSAZIONE. 297 

in his immortal St. Cecilian Ode! with what exquisite art has he 
shown us Alexander moved to alternate joy, pride, shame, weeping, 
frenzy, as old Timotheus sweeps the lyre in varied strains ! 

Now, in sober broughams and in hack-cabs — driven, I hope, by 
regenerated cabmen, who give tickets before they are asked for them, 
and never charge more than thirty per cent, above the legal fare — or 
haply, if the night be fine, on foot, the serious audience, well cloaked 
and bonneted, leave the hall. For half an hour afterwards, the Exeter 
Hall side of the Strand, both east and west, is dotted with serious 
groups in search of the last omnibus, or, perchance, boldly walking 
home. I wonder how many of the serious ones know anything of the 
thoroughfare. They may traverse it at noonday, or pass down it every 
morning for twenty years in omnibuses on their way to the city ; but 
do they know anything of the night aspect of that most mysterious of 
London thoroughfares ? It is better, perhaps, that they should not. 

Minute by minute they grow scarcer, and by ten minutes to eleven 
there are no serious groups in the Strand. They are all gone home to 
supper — hot ones, very probably, for the serious world is not at all un- 
addicted to good living — and sober. I, too, have liberty to go and sup, 
if I so choose ; but not, alas ! to bed. Still have I work to do, and 
for some hours. 



ELEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.— A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE, 
AND AN EVENING PARTY. 

It is Eleven o'Clock post meridian, and I am once more thrown, with 
my clock on my hands, on the great world of London. The insatiable^ 
restless metropolis is as busy in the night as in the day season j there 
is no respite, no cessation, in its feverish activity. One set or class of 
mortals may, quite worn and worried out, cast themselves on beds more 
or less hard, and sleep ; but, forthwith, another section of the popula- 
tion arise like giants refreshed — the last hour of the night to some is 
the commencement, the opening day, to others ; and an innumerable 
army of conscripts are ready to relieve one another in mounting the 
guard of London Life. 

Eleven o'clock, and thousands are yet in the streets, tens of thou- 

v 



298 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

sands still in the pursuit of the avocations by which they earn their 
daily (or nightly) bread, hundreds of thousands awake, busy, and 
stirring. The children of the aristocracy and some sections of the 
middle classes are gone to bed— save those who have been so good that 
their fond parents have taken them to the play, which entertainment 
they are now enjoying, with delightful prospects superadded of " sitting 
up " to supper, perchance of oysters, afterwards. But the children of 
the poor do not dream of bed. They are toddling in and out of chan- 
dlers' shops in quest of ounces of ham and fragments of Dutch cheese 
for father's supper ; they are carrying the basket of linen — mother 
takes in washing— to the residences of clients ; they are eliminating 
the most savoury-looking bits of plaice or flounders from the oleaginous 
pile in the fried-fish shop ; they are fetching the beer and the " clean 
pipe" from the public-house; nay — not unfrequently, alas! assisted 
by a lean baby in arms — they are fetching father himself home from 
the too-seductive establishment of the licensed victualler. Eleven 
o'clock at night is the great supper-time of the working classes ; then, 
by the steady and industrious mechanic, the final calumet is smoked, 
the borrowed newspaper read, the topics of the day, the prospects of the 
coming week, discussed with the cheery and hard-working helpmate 
who sits by the side of her horny-handed lord, fills his pipe, pours out 
his beer, and darns the little children's hose. 

Eleven o'clock : theatrical audiences are at their apogee, and the 
last piece is " on." Convivial clubs are in full action, and the waiters 
at the supper-rooms, very tumbled and drowsy during the day, put on 
their most highly-starched neckcloths, and begin to rub their eyes, in 
preparation for the labours of the night. The linen-drapers' shopmen, 
who have been strolling about Eegent Street and Oxford Street since 
the shops closed at nine, and who " live on the premises/' begin to 
turn in ; the proprietors tolerate no gadding about after eleven, and 
persistence in keeping bad hours to the extent of hearing the chimes at 
midnight, out of doors, would entail reprimand, and perhaps expulsion, 
on the offender. At eleven o'clock close the majority of the coffee, chop 
houses, and reading-rooms. There are some that will remain open all 
night ; but they are not of the most reputable description. At eleven 
the cheap grocer, the cheesemonger, and the linen-draper, in low-priced 
neighbourhoods, begin to think of putting up the shutters; and, by 
half-past eleven, the only symposia of merchandise open will be the 
taverns and cigar-shops, the supper-rooms and shell-fish warehouses, the 



ELEVEN P.M. A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE. 299 

night coffee-houses, and the chemists — which last shops, indeed, never 
seem to be quite open, or quite closed, at all, and may be said to sleep 
with one eye open. 

Eleven o'clock at the Y/est-end is, morally speaking, broad day- 
light. Midnight will be high noon. Fashionable life's current riots 
through the veins of West-end streets ; mirth, and gaiety, and intrigue, 
are heard on staircases and at street corners. And pre-eminently wide 
awake, busy, active, and restless just now is the great and mysterious 
country of Bohemia, both Upper and Lower. You are beginning to 
hear of Bohemia, oh, reflective reader ! and of its shady denizens* 
Recondite, half-reluctant allusions are made to it in solemn reviews and 
portentous magazines. An arch- Bohemian proposed the other day to 
write a novel concerning the present condition of his country. The 
book actually appeared, but its author stumbled on the threshold of his 
own subject, Either he dared not say that which he knew, or he had 
over-estimated his knowledge of things Bohemian : and he drew, not 
the real country, but an impalpable region full of monsters. But his 
was no easy task. After all, who shall say, who can tell, where Bohemia 
really is, and who really are Bohemians 1 They are secretly affiliated, 
and to each other known, like freemasons, like the Illuminati and 
Brethren of the Rosy Cross of the last century, like Balzac's u Treize ;" 
but the outside world knows them not, and oft-times mistakes for a 
Bohemian a vile Illyrian, a contemptible Styrian, a worthless Croat, or 
a base Bezonian. Is there a king of Bohemia % or is it an oligarchy, 
a theocracy, or a red republic % How does a man become a Bohemian, 
and can he e^er renounce his allegiance to the " friends of Bohemia," 
and become an ordinary citizen of the world % Yet Bohemianism is 
ubiquitous. The initiated ones are everywhere. In the House of 
Commons, at this very moment, a free and accepted Bohemian is 
pounding away at the ministry, and a past grand-master of Bohemian- 
ism is descending the steps of the Carlton. A Bohemian is dancing the 
Schottische in Westbourne Terrace, and his brother is passing under- 
neath Temple Bar, in a cab and in custody, on his way to Mr. Slow- 
man's caravanserai in Cursitor Street. There is a Bohemian, in white 
kid gloves and a white cravat, sitting in his opera-stall, and he whispers 
to his companion to order a Welsh rabbit and a pint of half-and-half 
for him at the Club. Some Bohemians are drinking claret at the 
Wellington, and others are sleeping among the vegetable baskets under 
the tarpaulins in Covent Garden Market. Bohemian No. one has just 



300 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

won a hundred pounds at ecarte. Bohemian No. two has just pawned 
his great-coat. A Bohemian has just gone home to read Plato, and 
take a basin of arrow-root for supper. Another has let himself out 
with his latch-key, and is on his way to the Haymarket. Oh, marvel- 
lous land! Oh, people yet more marvellous! Despised, derided, 
abused by men, ye are yet a power in the state. Bootmakers com- 
bine against ye ; but you can turn out governments. Clerks of 
county courts issue judgment summonses against ye ; but you dine 
at princes' tables. Lands you have not, nor jewels, nor raiment, 
nor fine linen, nor pieces of gold, nor pieces of silver ; still do ye 
travel first-class express ; still do you clamour for green fat at mighty 
banquets, and turn up your Bohemian noses if the venison be not 
hung to your liking ; still do you pride yourselves upon being good 
judges of Rhine wine and Habana cigars. A peculiar race ! And 
the most astonishing thing about the Bohemian is this : that he does 
not — as the non-Bohemian charitably supposes and reports — die in an 
hospital, to be saved from dissection, and humbly buried, only by a 
subscription among his Bohemian associates. If he be an ass and a 
profligate, he goes to the bad, and serve him right ; but the Bohemian, 
dying, frequently leaves a great deal more money behind him than yon- 
der starched man of business, who professed to regard him, during his 
lifetime, with a shuddering, pitying horror. The Bohemian, brought, 
as it would seem, to the lowest and forlornest state of impecuniosity 
and discredit, suddenly starts up as Attorney-General of Yellow-Jack 
Island with twelve hundred a year, as Judge-Advocate of the Meridional 
Quashiboos, or Consul-General to the Tontine Republic. 

While thus discoursing to you on things in general, I have been 
keeping a sharp look-out for the most notable things that are to be 
seen in London at eleven p.m. But as we shall have to sit up very late 
to-night — or rather early to-morrow morning — I think it right that we 
should pass the time till midnight in a quiet and decorous manner. 
Not but that we have been exceedingly well-behaved ever since the 
commencement of our peripatetics ; but life is life, and one can scarcely 
go twice round the clock in London without some moral and physical 
wear and tear. Suppose we drop in at a Conversazione. 

This (more or less) social reunion is an institution of purely modern 
invention. It is the latest device of the fantastically despotic organisa- 
tion we call " society," with the exception of the dansante, or dancing 
tea. It might be alleged, but the allegation would be open to the 



F1EVEN P.M. A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE. 301 

imputation of hjpercriticism, that the first conversazione on English 
record was the meeting of the Royal Society at which King Charles II. 
propounded the famous problem of the live fish in the pail of water : 
and another semblance of a conversazione might be found in the assem- 
blage of antiquaries at the christening of Martinus Scriblerus. But 
the real conversazione is quite another affair, and wholly modern. It 
is not much more than twenty years old, its establishment following 
close on the heels of the fashionable " rout," which again succeeded the 
"assemblies" of our grandmothers and the " drums" of our great- 
grandmothers. The modern conversazione means a room or a suite of 
rooms thrown open for the reception of a miscellaneous mob of fashion- 
ables or of celebrities, foreign and native, political, literary, scientific, 
or artistic. It is a vast menagerie, a " happy family" on a monster 
scale, a Noah's ark upon dry ground, and the birds, beasts, and fishes 
crowd and elbow each other, and roar, or yell, or howl, or bark, or low, 
or grunt, or squeak, or crow, or whistle, or scream, or pipe, to the in- 
finite delectation of the host and hostess. The only sounds proper to 
the animal or ornithological kingdom are those which might be sup- 
posed to be produced by billing and cooing ; for the guests are not — or 
do not in general look — very good-tempered, and a favourite manner of 
passing the time at a conversazione is to scowl at your neighbour, and 
wonder who the deuce he is. But one of the chief advantages con- 
nected with these bringings-together of celebrities, lies in the moderate 
sum for which the thing can be done. The conversazione is eminently 
cheap. They don't give these lions any shinbones of beef; tea, coffee, 
macaroons, and, at very hospitable houses, sandwiches and wishy-washy 
negus, are all that you can reckon upon in the way of refreshment at a 
conversazione. 

Of late days, conversaziones, which were ordinarily given by private 
persons — the Mrs. Leo Hunters of the beau monde — have been held by 
societies literary and learned, nay, even by commercial and financial 
companies. I remember myself receiving on one occasion an invite to 
a " conversazione" at which the novel principles of a new life assurance 
company, and the immense advantages offered to shareholders, assurers, 
and annuitants, were to be fully developed and explained. The con- 
versazione was held at the bran-new offices of the company, smelling 
very strongly of recent varnish, putty, and French polish, and of calf 
ledgers and day-books yet innocent of entries. There were plenty of 
ladies in evening dress, and plenty of gentlemen in white waistcoats. 



302 TWICE EOUXD THE CLOCK. 

and flirtation and gallantry were oddly mixed up with the Northampton 
Tables and the Institute of Actuaries. We had a neat lecture by a stout 
gentleman, in a blue coat buttoned up to the chin, upon the inestimable 
blessings of life assurance. Tea and coffee were handed round in the 
intervals of his discourse upon bonuses, paid-up capital, and the pur- 
chase of reversions ; and an immense sensation was created at the ter- 
mination of tho lecture by the recitation, on the part of the orator, of a 
neat little copy of verses, of which the commencing stanzas, so far as my 
recollection will serve me, ran somewhat thus : — ■ 

" "When dear papa went up to heaven, 
What grief mamma endured ! 
And yet that grief was softened, for 
Papa he was assured. 

" He never lodged his policy, 
He left it to mamma ; 
The cfHee paid most cheerfully, 
How happy now we are ! " 

This touching effusion w r as received with great waving of handkerchiefs, 
and some sobs, indeed, on the part of the ladies, and I have no doubt 
that many of those fair ones on returning home did that night incite, 
command, and compel their liege lords and masters forthwith to assure 
their lives in the " Amiable and General Fire and Life Assurance 
Company " (with which are incorporated the " Good-natured and Law 
Life/' the " Equitable and Jocular Fire," and the " Compassionate 
and Confidential Deposit and Loan Association"). The friendly 
meeting of the " Amiable and General " was distinguished above other 
conversaziones by the fact, that when the ladies had taken their de- 
parture, a capital cold supper, and abundant libations of champagne, 
were provided for the directors and their friends, at which repast, 
which lasted to a very advanced hour, everybody drank everybody 
else's health with all the honours, and everybody was made a prefer- 
ential shareholder. I know that I was ; though I am not quite aware 
at the present moment of the exact locality of the " Amiable and 
General's " offices, or, indeed, whether that most promising company is 
still in existence. 

The strange conversaziones a man may from time to time visit ! I 
have been to one at the Hanover Square Rooms given by the con- 
fraternity of dentists. Slim gentlemen of Carker-like dental develope- 
ment held forth on the transcendant merit of the art of pulling out 



ELEVEN P.M. — A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE. 303 

people's teeth, and fiercely denounced the quacks and impostors who 
ignorantly tampered with the jaws of her Majesty's subjects; the room 
itself was hung round with the most hideous coloured cartoons, repre- 
sentative of diverse phases of dental surgery, and I came away haunted 
by visions of pink beeswax, thin gold plates, morocco easy chairs, 
springs, dents osanores, artificial gums, and those dreadfully clean 
hands, the wrists garnished by wristbands as clean, which seem to be 
the exclusive property of dentists. I congratulated myself, too, on my 
departure, on the fact that no visitor to the conversazione had, for the 
pure love of art, pulled out one of my few remaining teeth, just as, 
after dining with a schoolmaster, I felicitate myself for having escaped 
a caning. There is something in the whiteness of a dentist's hand, and 
in the twinkling of a schoolmaster's gray eye, that would make me 
tremble were I Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. 

But the oddest conversazione 1 ever attended was not in this 
country, but in a foreign land. It was in Paris — and I am speaking 
seriously — a conversazione of coiffeurs, of barbers, hair-dressers, and 
wig-makers. I declare that I have seldom passed a more agreeable 
evening in my life. Everything was conducted on the most intensely 
genteel footing, and everybody was ceremoniously polite ; although I 
must be candid in admitting that a decided odour of pomatum and 
freshly-frizzled curls pervaded the salon, which was, indeed, the up- 
stairs room of a restaurant at Montmartre. There were ladies present, 
too ; and after some pleasant little discourse, all tending to the glorifica- 
tion of hair-dressing, an eminent professor of the philocomal art there 
present proceeded to a series of practical and illustrative experiments 
on the heads of some of the young ladies, in order to show the different 
styles of dressing and arranging the head which had prevailed from 
the time of Francois, premier Jusqu 9 a nos jours, to our own days. 
The ladies submitted with charming equanimity to the operation, and 
the experimentalist was enabled to submit to public inspection and 
admiration a full-blown Ninon d'Encios, a Mademoiselle de Mont- 
pensier, a Duchesse de Longueville, a Madame de Main tenon, to- 
gether with several Du Barris, De la Vallieres, Pompadours, Madame 
Talliens, Mademoiselle Mars, Charlotte Cordays, and Theroigne de 
Mericourts. At the conclusion of the experiments, there was a grand 
procession of the ladies variously coiffees round the room, followed by 
the triumphant hair- dressers, waving their tongs and combs, and 
redolent of puff-powder ; then we had orgeat and anisette ; and then I 



304 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK:. 

went and supped in the restaurant downstairs with one of the hair- 
dressers, who went me halves in a bottle of Beaune, and swore eternal 
friendship to me over a Mayonnaise de homard. 

But to return to the conversazione world of London. Suppose we 
take a literary one to begin with : say one of Mrs. Van Umbug's 
Thursdays. Mrs. Van Umbug lives at that classically severe mansion, 
the "Arena, Gladiator's Crescent, Nero Square." Mr. Van Umbug is a 
member of Parliament, and sits on the Liberal side of the House, but 
nobody takes much notice of him, and he is usually alluded to as Mrs. 
Van Umbug's husband. If you ask the coachman in the adjacent 
mews whose horses are those the helper is harnessing to the brougham, 
he will probably answer, " Mrs. Van Umbug's." The servants in the 
house in Gladiator Street, talk continually of " Missus " (who makes 
her presence not only seen but felt), but scarcely ever mention 
" Master." The tradespeople usually send in their bills to Mrs. Van 
Umbug ; and it is certain that it is that lady who issues the invitations 
and receives the company at her Thursday conversaziones. Mr. Van 
Umbug, M.P., is scarcely ever seen at those gatherings, and when he is, 
rarely, manifest, it is in a very meek and subdued manner. He sneaks 
in and out as if the house didn't belong to him (which, indeed, it does 
not), and appears desperately afraid of the portly man in black with 
the white Berlin gloves who hands round the tea and coffee. 

Mrs. Van Umbug's mansion is supposed to be furnished in the 
highest style of taste and virtu. Hers is quoted as an abode of all 
that is elegant, recherche, and distingue. "What are taste and virtu, 
I wonder ? what makes things elegant, distingue, and recherche ? Do 
chairs that you can't sit down upon, and spindled -shanked tables, 
tottering beneath the weight of gaudily-bound books, containing speci- 
mens of chromo-lithography ? do a sham pre-Raphaelite picture or two, 
in which a long-legged swain is courting a lady with yellow hair and a 
striped dress falling in unnatural folds, under the lee of a marvellously- 
executed waterbutt — a curiously-manipulated mangold- wurzel, and a 
minutely finished frying-pan occupying the foreground? do scraps of 
armour and oak-carvings, supposed to be ancient, but in reality 
manufactured the week before last in Wardour Street ? do odds and 
ends, and Chinese monsters in porcelain, and a Louis Quinze clock, 
and the model of a Swiss chalet in box-wood, and an imitation grotto 
and aquarium in an ante-room 1 I suppose these things do. 

This present Thursday at Mrs. Van Umbug's is a great literary one. 



ELEVEN P.M. — A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE. 305 

The lions of literature are present in the flesh. Here is the distin- 
guished Snortup, author of " The Common Objects of the Back-yard," 
" Geology in Joke," " Trigonometry Judged by Taxation," " The Ex- 
tinct Animals of Eel-pie Island," and other erudite and ponderous 
scientific works. Snortup, who is a Doctor of Philosophy of the Uni- 
versity of Schinckelbrauen, is a heavy man, with a black wig and a 
huge black satin stock, in which gleams a cameo bearing a curious 
resemblance to an oyster. He snuffs a great deal, and when he speaks 
he does not belie his name, but literally snorts. Near him is young 
Twiddles, with his auburn hair, his turn-down collar, and Byron tie, 
his speckled silk stockings and low shoes, his baby face and falsetto 
voice. Twiddles, who writes under the pseudonym of Swedenborg 
Scanderberg, has just published a volume of poems of the ultra-spas- 
modic order. In passages replete with burning eloquence, he has 
spoken of the " moonbeam's frosty rime, that hoars the head of nature, 
and makes last summer's sapling patriarchal white." His grand pas- 
sage in " Ladye Babbynetta," in which he alludes to ei the hot and 
rabid ice, that burns and sears by force of congelation," has been en- 
thusiastically spoken of by Sidney Muffins, editor of the tc Tomfool" 
(with which is incorporated the "Pinchbeck News") weekly journal. 
Muffins is not a poet yet, but he hopes to be one when his whiskers 
grow and he has read " Gassel's Popular Educator." Meanwhile, he 
swears by Twiddles, and fiercely abuses, in print and in person, those 
who can't avoid the conviction that Twiddles is a donkey. 

Do you see that man with the enormous red beard, the black velvet 
cuffs, collars, and facings to his coat, and the fez cap ? That is O'Roarer. 
0' Roarer is a special correspondent to the "Howl" daily newspaper. 
O'Roarer went to the Crimea for the " Howl," during the war ; he quar- 
relled with a major in a marching regiment, and challenged him to 
mortal combat. The general commanding the division was compelled 
to request O'Roarer to select some other locality for his hut, and 
terrific were the criticisms upon that divisional general's military con- 
duct, which subsequently appeared in the " Howl." Little Eggles, 
who was a clerk in the Commissariat Department, who hates O'Roarer, 
declares that he was found in Balaclava once returning from a carouse 
on board ship, and Bacchi plenus, that he was taken to the main-guard, 
and in the morning, notwithstanding his protestations that it was "all 
a mistake," and his assertions of his "responsible position," he received 
the customary hospitality of the main-guard, namely, two dozen lashes. 



306 TWICE ROTJHD Tltt CLOCK. 

Eggles adds, with a knowing wink, that the provost-marshal was not 
General *s nephew for nothing. 

Besides Mr. 0' Roarer and his fellows already described, there is the 
Honourable Simperkin Blushington, that pleasing novelist and Oriental 
traveller. A little to the left, and scowling at the Honourable Simper- 
kin fearfully, is Leathers, the author of " A Jaunt to Jericho " and 
" Seven Years in a Penal Settlement." Leathers wears a huge cut- 
velvet waistcoat, that looks like a fragment from some tapestried win- 
dow-curtain. He is not at all clever, is Leathers — has no humour, 
observation, or power of description ; but he has got a name among the 
book-selling trade, somehow, as a "good travelling hand" — a safe man 
for two volumes royal octavo with plates and a map — and so soon does 
any foreign country, from Canton to British Columbia, begin, from 
political or other causes, to attract public attention, so soon is Leathers 
commissioned to write his two bulky volumes of travels therein. Ill- 
natured people say that he keeps particulars relative to geography 
pigeon-holed in his library, and that he never went further than Bou- 
logne, in the days of the five-shilling fares ; but Leathers gets his price, 
and can afford to laugh at the evil-speaking. Bonassus, the publisher, 
of Bumpus Street, will have Leathers's portrait in the next edition of 
" Rambles in the Island of Perim." 

I am sure it is very ungallant in me to have been so long silent re- 
garding the ladies who grace the literary conversazione with their 
presence. A man must be, indeed, a brute who could pass over the 
charms of Miss Withers, aged forty, authoress of " Crackings of the 
Heartstrings," " Shudderiiigs of the Soul," "CrinHings of the Spirit- 
skin," " Eyeball Darts," and other pathetic lyrics. Miss Yv T ithers once 
kept a boarding-school, but gradually languished into poetry. She 
attained considerable celebrity in the time of the Annuals, but on the 
downfall of those amusing ephemerides, she betook herself to history, 
and is the writer of " Lives of the Yv r et Nurses of the Princesses of 
England," " Memorials of celebrated Bedchamber Women," and " The 
Silversticks in Waiting before the Conquest" — all works replete with 
critical acumen, and brimful of historical lore, though following a little 
too closely in the footsteps of a lady who has written an admirable and 
genuine History concerning some Queens of England. Miss Withers, 
however, has done very well for her publishers and for herself. She 
is one of those authoresses who, dying, would never wish to blot out a 
line they had written, simply because Heaven has gifted them with a 



ELEYEN P.M. A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE. 307 

happy mental cecity that prevents them from discerning that nine- 
tenths of their works should never have been written at all. You may 
see Miss Withers any day in the British Museum Reading-room, vigor- 
ously compiling away at the desk marked "for ladies only." She has 
piles of books around her ; she makes the attendants' lives a torment to 
them with the flying squadrons of book-tickets she deposits at the bar ; 
she walks about the india-rubber flooring with one pen behind her ear 
and another in her mouth. She, being tall, bony, severe of aspect, and 
much given to snuff-taking, is generally feared by the Museum fre- 
quenters. She wrenches volumes of the catalogue from mild young 
clergymen in spectacles and M. B. waistcoats. She follows line after 
line of the printed page with her heavy ink stained forefinger. Once 
Dedman the pedigree-hunter, who was filling up his ticket opposite 
Miss Withers, was venturous enough to ask her the day of the month. 
She called him, in a hollow voice, " fellow," on the spot, snuffed indig- 
nantly, and afterwards spoke of him to the attendant with the red 
moustache as an " impertinent jackanapes." The only person with 
whom she condescends to be conversational in the reading-room, is 
Eglintoun Beaverup, the famous novelist, satirist, poet, traveller, Quar- 
terly Reviewer, essayist, epigrammatist and politician, who stood for the 
Macbeth district of burghs last general election, and proved in an article 
in the " Rampant Magazine," that the present Duke of Sennacherib's 
grandfather was a pork butcher in Liquorpond Street, and that Sir 
Ranulph De Brie's papa (who was a pawnbroker) owed his baronetcy 
to a loan of ten thousand pounds, advanced by him to the Prince 
Regent on the security of a pinchbeck watch, which that improvident 
scion of royalty, having no other available pawnable property, had 
borrowed for the nonce from one of the helpers in his stable. Beaverup 
is himself descended from Brian de Bois Ghiilbert on the father's side, 
and from the original Thane of Cawdor, who slew Duncan, on that of 
the mother. Miss Withers will sometimes exchange deadly whispers 
with him relative to the mushroom characteristics of our modern 
peerage, and the departed glories of soccage and villeinage, infang 
theof and outfang theof. 

Ah ! and you are there, too, at Mrs. Yan Umbug's conversazione, 
little Fanny Grillytin. Even so ! behold Fanny in a black satin dress 
and a laced her the, and her yellow wavy hair parted on one side like a 
man, seated on an ottoman in deep conversation with Professor Sven- 
turato, that red-hot republican, formerly one of the tribunes of the 



308 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

Ultramontane Republic ; next, under the name of Kibaub Bey, a colonel 
in the Turkish service, warring against the Moscovs in Anatolia ; then 
deputy-assistant quartermaster-general under the immortal Walker, 
liberator of Nicaragua; next, an actor at the Varietes Theatre, New 
Orleans ; next, keeper of an oyster and lager bier saloon, in One- 
Hundred-and-Twenty-seventh Street, Ginslingopolis, in the United 
States of America ; next, of Paris, Milan, Turin, Vienna, and Pesth, 
travelling as a broom-girl, an old woman, a Jesuit priest, a waiter at a 
cafe, a Franciscan friar, and a clown to a circus ; now of the Whet- 
stone Park College for Ladies (by whom he is adored), professor of 
modern languages ; during the foregoing time, and occasionally, a pri- 
soner in divers cells, wards, casemates, underground dungeons, oubliettes, 
piombi, ergastoli, and penal colonies, from all of which he has escaped 
by means little short of miraculous. Fanny, they say, is madly in love 
with Sventurato, and would marry him, were not the professor already 
allied to a Moldo-Wallachian lady, the daughter of a Kaimakan, whose 
heroism effected his escape from the citadel of Comorn, and who after- 
wards essayed to poison him in his coffee. Fanny is no less mad after 
liberty, by which she means universal democracy, universal spoliation, 
and universal smash. She has some private fortune, which she dis- 
penses liberally among necessitous refugees ; and in furtherance of the 
sacred cause of liberty — as she understands it — she has written piles of 
books. She is the authoress of that flaming epic, " The Tyrant's 
Entrails, or a Maiden's Wish ; " " Crowns and Coffins, or Oligarchs and 
Ogres," an historical retrospect; "Mazzini the Shiloh," and "Vic- 
tory and Vitriol," those soul-stirring pamphlets. She signs revolution- 
ary bank-notes ; she applauds regicide ; she is in correspondence (in a 
complicated cipher which every police official from Paris to Petersburg 
understands and laughs at) with foreign revolutionary committees. 
She visits the Continent sometimes to distribute funds and ammunition. 
She would be ready to assume man's clothes for the benefit of her 
adored liberty — as she understands it. Ah ! Fanny, Fanny, pause ; 
ah ! rash and foolish girl, for whom to be whipped and sent to bed 
would be the better portion, forbear to play with these edged tools ! 
No second-sight is necessary for the result of these miserable machina- 
tions to be manifest. I see the portico of a theatre brilliantly lighted 
up ; for a Tyrant and his young innocent wife come hither to-night. 
He is hemmed in by guards and police-agents ; yet, for all his escort, 
desperate men rush forward and throw hand-grenades beneath his car- 



ELEVEN P.M. A SCIENTIFIC CONVEKSAZIONE. 309 

riage- wheels. A horrible explosion, and then scores of peaceful men, 
women, and children, are borne, dead or frightfully mutilated, to the 
hospitals : and the Tyrant, safe and sound, bows to a cheering audience 
from his box. I see four downcast men sitting between gensd'arme on 
the criminals' bench of a crowded court-house, before stern judges who 
have doomed them to death before the very reading of the indictment. 
I see a straight-waistcoated wretch sitting in his chair in a gloomy cell, 
his head bent down, the governor and the priest standing by, while the 
executioner cuts off his hair and shaves the back of his neck. I see a 
grim, gray winter's morning in the fatal Place of the Roquette. A space 
is kept clear by thousands of horse, foot, artillery, and police ; and, 
thrust to the furthermost limits of the place, is a pale-faced crowd surg- 
ing like a sea. Then the drums beat, and the dismal procession issues 
from a prison to a scaffold. Then, tottering between priests and turn- 
keys, come two bare-footed men, with long white shirts over their gar- 
ments, and their faces concealed by hideous black veils. But the veils 
are removed w T hen they mount the scaffold, when one by one a distorted, 
livid face, with white lips, appears, when the executioner seizes the 
pinioned criminal, and flings him — yes, flings him, is the w r ord — on 
the plank. Then I see the horrible gash in the face as the moribund 
strives to shape his mouth to utter his last words on earth ; the last 
up-turning of the starting eye-balls ; but the plank reverses, the rollers 
revolve, the slide closes, the spring is touched, the knife falls, the 
blood spouts, and the heads drop into the sawdust of the red basket. 
Liberty, equality, and fraternity, flaming epics, soul-stirring pamphlets, 
and complicated ciphers, have come to this miserable end. The Tyrant 
is borne through the streets, the people shouting, and the maidens 
strewing flowers at his feet. The telegram has been despatched from 
the revolutionary committee to the Roquette, and the answer is a corpse 
that quivers, the parricide's shroud, and the headsman's bloody axe. 

Of course there are some titled folks at Mrs. Van Umbug's conver- 
sazione : it would not be complete without a literary lord — a harmless 
nobleman, generally, who has translated Horace, invented a new metre, 
or discovered a new butterfly ; and a literary lady — if separated from 
her husband all the better, who paints him in the darkest of colours, as 
the hero of every one of her novels. And, equally of course, Ethelred 
Guffoon is here. Ethelred Guffoon is everywhere. He is one of Mrs. 
Van Umbug's special favourites. She calls him by his Christian name. 
He hunts up new lions for her ; occasionally he officiates as peacemaker, 



310 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK:. 

and prevents the lions from growling and fighting among themselves. 
He rushes from Mrs. Van Umbug's conversazione to the Pontoppidan 
Theatre, to see a new face, which he must criticise ; after that he will 
sit up half the night to review Mr. Gladstone's Homer, for the " Daily 
Scratcher," and will be at Somerset House by punctual office hours the 
next morning. A man of the age, Ethelred Guffoon — a man of the time, 
a good fellow, but frivolous. 

I wonder whether the celebrities one sees at this shadowy conver- 
sazione really represent the literary world — the real people who write 
the books and think the thoughts. I am afraid they do not. I fear 
that to find the princes of the pen, the giants of the land of letters, I 
must go further afield. Lo, here is Great Tom of Chelsea, sitting 
cosily, in his back parlour, smoking a pipe of bird's-eye with Eglintoun 
Beaverup, and telling him he is about having his ceilings whitewashed. 
Here is Lord Livy poring over Restoration and Revolution broadsides 
by his reading-lamp in his lonely chambers in the Albany * — no, not 
lonely, the spirits of the old historic men come from their dusty shelves 
and clap him on the shoulder, and cry, "Go on and prosper, Thomas 
Babington, Lord Livy." The great Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, is 
bidden to the Duke of Sennacherib's, and as he roils to Sennacherib 
House in his brougham, meditates satiric onslaughts on " Tom Gar- 
bage" and " Young Grubstreet" — those Tom Thumb foes of his* — in 
the next number of the " Pennsylvanians," Mr. Goodman Twoshoes 
is reading one of his own books to the members of the Chawbacon 
Athenaeum, and making, I am delighted to hear, a mint of money by 
the simple process. Goldpen, the poet, has taken his wife and children 
to Miss P. Horton's entertainment ; Bays, the great dramatist, is sitting 
in the stalls of the Pontoppidan Theatre listening with rapt ears to the 
jokes in his own farce ; and Selwyn Cope, the essayist, is snoring snugly 
between the sheets, having to rise very early to-morrow morning in 
order to see a man hanged. And where are the working-men of litera- 
ture, the conscripts of the pen, doomed to carry Brown Bess, for sixpence 
a day^ all their lives ? Where are Garbage and Grubstreet ? In the 
worst inn's worst room, with racing prints half hung, the walls of piaster 
and the floors of sand, at once a deal table but stained with beer, sits 
Garbage playing four-handed cribbage with an impenitent hostler, a 
sporting man who has sold the fight, and a potboy who is a returned 

* "He made the giants first, and then he killed their ," —Fielding' s " Tom T7iumb." 



ELEYEN P.M. A SCIENTIFIC COXYEHSAZIONE. 311 

convict 1 Sits he there, I ask, or is he peacefully pursuing his vocation 
in country lodgings 1 And Grubstreet, is he in some murky den, with 
a vulture's quill dipped in vitriol inditing libels upon the great, good, 
and wise of the day ? Wonder upon wonders, Grubstreet sits in a hand- 
some study — listening to his wife laughing, over her crochet work, at 
Mr. Polyphemus's last attack on him, and dandling a little child upon 
his knee ! Oh ! the strange world in which we live, and the post that 
people will knock their heads against ! 

From a literary to a learned or scientific conversazione, at one of 
which we are about to take a transient peep, there is but one step ; 
indeed, literature is always welcome among the good-natured old Dry- 
asdusts, who are continually raking and rummaging, and rocking the 
K placers'' and " prospects" of knowledge, and turning up huge masses 
of quartz, from which the nimble-fingered chymists of the pen extract 
flakes of shining gold. Presto ! we leave the Republic of Letters, and 
are in the handsome rooms of the Royal Inquiring Society. This 
meritorious association (incorporated by Royal charter) is perpetually 
asking questions, and, though it often receives insufficient, if not ridicu- 
lous responses, jet manages, at the close of every year, to accumulate 
a highly-respectable stock of information on almost every imaginable 
topic. The members, I will assume (would that such a society in strict 
reality existed), are draughts from all the learned, scientific, philoso° 
phical, antiquarian, and artistic societies in London ; and on the first 
Thursday in every month during the season, they meet to gioze over 
curiosities exhibited for their inspection, to shake hands and crack jokes 
with one another — I have even seen the friendly dig in the ribs, accom- 
panied by the sly chuckle, occasionally administered — and to ask ques- 
tions and receive answers. They are " iNotes and Queries" (chattiest, 
most quaintly-erudite of periodicals) incarnated. But they abjure not 
the presence of the gentler, unscientific sex. These rare old boys of 
learning and science thread their way through the rooms (sometimes 
almost inconveniently crowded, for the Royal Inquiring Society is very 
popular) with blooming wives and daughters on their arms. The young 
ladies delight in these conversaziones — for a change. They are so 
strange, so peculiar, they say. You don't meet anybody to dance with 
or to talk about the weather, or the Crystal Palace, or crinoline, or the 
Botanical Gardens ; but you see such nice old gentlemen, with dear, 
shiny, bald heads, and such wonderful intellectual-looking beings, with 
long hair, turn-down collars, and large feet, who smell musty bones with 



312 



TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 




ELEVEN P.M. — A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE. 313 

unpronounceable names, and make* extraordinary instruments to whiz 
round, and point out places upon maps, and talk so cleverly (but so in- 
comprehensibly to you, my dears) about rusty coins and the backbones 
of fishes, and battered saucepans, which they say are helmets. And 
then there are the nice stereoscopes to peep through, and the beautiful 
water-colour drawings and photographs to look at, and the old gentle* 
men are so quiet and so polite, and so different from the young men one 
meets in society, who either stammer and blush or are superciliously 
rude and put their hands in their trousers' pockets. Yes, young ladies, 
the bald-headed old gentlemen, the careworn, long-haired, slovenly- 
looking men, are quiet and polite. They were, many of them, poor and 
humble once ; but they have hewn out steps from the rock of knowledge, 
whereby they have mounted to that better fortune — European, World- 
wide fame. That quiet man with gray hair, smiles when ministers 
press upon him a knighthood or a baronetcy : " Cui bono ?" he says ; " I 
would rather be a corresponding member of the Academy of Honolulu. 
When I am old and broke, and past work, you may give me enough for 
a little bread in my old days \ I take it as a Right, not as a favour,' 5 
just as Turner the painter left in his will the simple direction that he 
was to be buried in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. — " St. Paul's is 
for the painters and the warriors, as Westminster Abbey is for the poets 
and statesmen ; but I want not your honours and titles. Such as you 
have, you bestow on your lawyers and your lacqueys ; but your captains 
are almost ashamed to take the decorations that are shared by footmen 
and backstairs cringers." 

You have readily divined, I hope, why I have instructed the dex- 
terous limner who illustrates these pages to select for his subject the 
scientific, rather than the literary, conversazione. The men of science 
do not obtrude their personalities upon the public. Their fame is 
known, their influence felt from London to Louisiana, but their por- 
traits seldom meet the public eye. Those of General Tom Thumb or 
the Christy Minstrels would attract more crowds to the print-shop 
windows, and sell better. But, good lack ! what a commotion there 
would be if the portraits of a series of litterateurs, in their habits as 
they live, appeared in " Twice Round the Clock !" I should be de- 
nounced, repudiated, vilified, abused, for the artist's misdeeds. The 
great Mr. Polyphemus would crush me mercilessly beneath his iron 
heel j Grubstreet would (threaten to) kick me ; Garbage would have 
me on the hip ; 0' Roarer smite me beneath the fifth rib ; Leathers 

x 



314 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

devise devices against me to make my existence intolerable ; and Ethel- 
red Guffoon castigate me terribly in his popular paper, " The Half- 
penny Cane." No ; let me deal only with the shadows ; and those that 
the cobweb cap fits, e'en let them wear it. 

At Eleven o'Clock in the evening, the social institutions known as 
Evening Parties assume their gayest and most radiant aspect. I think 
that I have already hinted in these pages that I am not a very frequent 
visitor at these entertainments. The truth must out : the people 
don't like me. At the last soiree I attended, a fashionable physician, 
coming in very late, and throwing out for general hearing the fact that 
he had been dining with an earl, I meekly suggested that he should 
allow me to rub myself up against him, in order to catch some of his 
aristocracy. All the women laughed, but the men looked as though 
they would have very much liked to throw me out of the window. 
There was one exception — a gentleman with one eye, and a face like a 
glass case full of curiosities, so many different phases of expression were 
there in it, who came across to me and made friends at once. But I 
shall never be asked to that house again ; and if I am ill, I won't send for 
the fashionable physician. Timeo Dandos i and the pills they give you. 

Thus circumstanced, I feel it becoming my degree to stay on the 
outside of great houses, and, herding among the crowd and the link- 
men, to witness the setting down and the taking up of the carriages 
coming to or going from evening parties. It has always been my lot 
so to stand on the kerb, to be a continual dweller on the threshold. I 
have stood there to see people married, to see people buried, and have 
murmured : " My turn must come next, surely ;" but my time has not 
come yet. A king has patted me on the head, and I have sate, as a 
child, on the knee of the handsomest woman in Europe, I have been 
on the brink of many a precipice ; I have attained the edge of many a 
cloud. But I have stopped there. I have always been like the recal- 
citrant costermonger's donkey, "going for to go," but never accom- 
plishing the journey in its entirety. 

I spoke of link-men. I might tell you a not uninteresting story 
regarding those industrials, in these gas-lit days growing day by day 
rarer and rarer. The tarred-rope made links are indeed, save on ex- 
traneous foggy nights, grown quite extinct, and are replaced by neat 
lanterns ; and the time will com^when the old red jackets, famous as 
a class from Grosvenor Square to the Horticultural Gardens at Chis- 



ELEVEN P.M. AN EVENING PARTY. 315 

wick, from the club-house fronts, on levee days, to the doorways of 
evening parties, shall become quite obsolete. But there is a grand old 
admiral living now— titled, high in office, before whom even his equals 
in rank bow, and who can make post-captains wait in his ante-chambers 
— who owes at least half his advancement and social position to the 
services of the link-men. Thirty years ago this officer was a young 
stripling, cast upon the ocean of London society. He was of good 
family, but his acquaintances in the fashionable world were few and far 
between, his influence was nil, and his promotion was therefore more 
than dubious. But at the Opera, then the King's Theatre, he hap- 
pened to form a shilling-giving on the one side, cap-touching on the 
other, acquaintance with a link-man — Silver Tom, I think he was 
called, from a silver badge he always wore, presented to him by a noble 
marquis whom he had saved from being prematurely scrunched on a 
certain dark night between his own carriage wheels and those of the 
equipage of a duchess, his grandmamma. "Silver Tom," moved by 
gratitude, and experienced by his (outside) knowledge of the fashion- 
able world, put the then young and poor lieutenant up to what is ver- 
nacularly known as "a thing or two." Not a grand entertainment 
could be given in Fashionabledom, but on the lieutenant's arrival in 
full evening costume, " Silver Tom" bawled up his name to the footman 
in attendance on the door-step (the regime of cards was not so strictly 
attended to as it is now) ; he on the door-step halloaed it out to the 
powdered attendant on the first landing ; he, in his turn, gave it to the 
black-vestmented groom of the chambers, who proclaimed it to the 
world in general in sonorous tones, and the bold lieutenant was in- 
ducted to the saloons of reception. Who was to know whether he had 
been invited to the feast or not? Not, certainly, the hostess, who, 
perhaps, did not know two hundred and fifty of her five hundred guests 
by sight. Some had been asked by her husband, some by herself. Not 
certainly the guests, who would not have been much surprised if they 
had met the Hottentot Venus or the King of the Cannibal Islands. 
The lieutenant made his bow and himself comfortable ; was sure to 
meet some lady or gentleman in society whom he knew, and probably 
departed with a list of half-a-dozen newly-formed and valuable acquaint- 
ances. He went on and prospered. Gradually, from being met and 
liked at great houses, he received genuine invitations, and, as I have 
premised, he made a good end of it at the Admiralty. I hope he pen- 
sioned " Silver Tom." 



316 



TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 




MIDNIGHT. THE KAYMARKET SrPPEE-KOOM S. 317 

Who is dead by this time, most probably ; but I can still stand by 
the side of his successor, at the door of the great house, by the lamp 
and lantern's glare, and see the gay company pass in and out. How 
the horses champ ! how the dresses rustle ! how the jewels shine ! and 
what fair women and brave men are here congregated ! Messrs. Weip- 
pert's or Collinet's band are upstairs ; Messrs. Gunter's men have 
brought the ices ; there are flirtations in the conservatories, and 
squeezings of hands interchanged on the stairs. Vows of love are 
spoken, flowers from bouquets are given; and is it not, after all, the 
same old, old story, that boys and girls will love one another, and that 
the old people will look on with pretended severity, but with real con- 
tentment in their hearts, and that there will be present a few jealous 
and cankered ones, who will look on to envy the others because they 
are so happy ? Drive envy from your hearts, ye who ride not in gilded 
chariots, and move not in the " fashionable circles." There is as much 
truth, love, and gaiety at a """ sixpenny hop," between maid-servants 
and journeymen bakers, as at the most refined evening parties. 



MIDNIGHT.— THE HAYMARKET, AND THE SUB-EDITOR'S 

ROOM. 

Midnight : an awful sound. Supposing you were to be hanged at 
three o'clock in the morning, as I am doomed to be, in a literary sense, 
how would you like to hear twelve o'clock sound I But three hours 
more to live! In three hours "the sheriff he will come," and the 
chaplain, and the hangman, as they came to Mr. Samuel Hall en route 
for Tyburn. In three hours the clock will run down ; the pendulum 
shall oscillate no more ; Time shall rest on his scythe ; the last grain 
of sand shall run out, and of these ephemeral papers you shall say fait. 
We have clomb the hill together, and we will rest together at the foot. 

Glancing over my map of London, and retracing the course of our 
peregrinations, I find, with some complacency, that we have not, after 
all, left many parts of the metropolis unexplored. We have been to 



318 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

Camberwell and to Hyde Park Corner ; to Pentonville and to London 
Bridge ; to Billingsgate and to Euston Square. It is true, that we 
have not yet penetrated to the interior of Buckingham Palace, or the 
condemned cell at Newgate, nor do I think that I shall assume the part 
of the Boy Jones or a visiting magistrate for your amusement; but 
we have been " behind the scenes" of more places than theatres since 
this clock was first wound up. It is not without regret now, that I 
linger over and dally with my few remaining hours. They have been very 
pleasant ones for me. I shall miss the printer's boy (for, be it known, 
I am about to abandon literature and go into trade, though I have not 
yet settled the precise business — corn, or coals, or commission agency). 
I shall miss, beyond aught else, the daily deluge of letters from anony- 
mous correspondents — praising, blaming, complaining, or inquiring, 
but all, I am glad to say, very appreciative readers of my shiftless 
writings. 

But we have come to the complexion of midnight, and the hour 
must be described. It is fraught with meaning for London. You 
know that in poetical parlance midnight is the time when church- 
yards yawn (they had need to be weary now, for the Board of Health 
won't allow them to receive any occupants intra muros), and graves 
give up their dead. And there be other grave-yards in London town 
■ — yards where no tombstones or brick vaults are — that at midnight 
yawn and send forth ghosts to haunt the city. A new life begins for 
London at midnight. Strange shapes appear of men and women who 
have lain a-bed all the day and evening, or have remained torpid in 
holes and corners. They come out arrayed in strange and fantastic 
garments, and in glaringly gaslit rooms screech and gabble in w r ild 
revelry. The street corners are beset by night prowlers. Phantoms 
arrayed in satin and lace flit upon the sight. The devil puts a 
diamond ring on his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt, and 
takes his walks abroad. It is a stranger sight than even the painter 
Raffet imagined in his picture of Napoleon's midnight review, and 
it is, I think, a much better thing to be at home and in bed, than 
wandering about and peeping into the mysteries of this unholy London 
night life. 

I know this book (to my sorrow) well ; have conned its grim 
pages, and studied its unwholesome lore, attentively. But I am not 
about to make you a too-recondite participant in my knowledge. Were 
it not that the appointed hours w T ere meted out to me, and that from one 
of the hours — midnight — the Haymarket is inseparable, the wicked 



MIDNIGHT. — THE HAYMARKET SUPPER-ROOMS. 319 

street should find no place here ; but I must be faithful to my trust, 
and the bad thoroughfare must be in part described. 

Foreigners have frequently pointed out to me a peculiar aspect of 
London, and one which appeals strongly to the observant faculties, 
and which, nevertheless, may escape us Cockneys who are to the 
metropolitan manner born. It is the duality of the huge city, not so 
much as regards its night and day side, as in its Sunday and week- 
day appearance. And this is not wholly to be ascribed to the shop 
shutters being closed. The Strand on Ash Wednesdays and Good 
Fridays is still the Strand ; but on the Sabbath it would seem as 
though every house in the West and East ends had put on its special 
Sunday suit, and had decorated itself with a certain smug spruceness 
quite marked and distinct. You have a difficulty in recognising your 
most familiar streets. Regent Street is quite altered. The aspect of 
Piccadilly is entirely changed; and Cheapside is no more like the 
Cheapside of yesterday than Hamlet is like Hecuba. The people, 
too, are not by any means the same people you meet on week-days. 
Not only their clothes are different, but their faces, their manners, 
their very gait and bearing, seem changed. You meet people out 
walking on Sundays, who during the week are confined to places 
where they are hidden from the public gaze, or are at most but half 
visible. You see the bar-maids' skirts and the pawnbrokers' legs on 
Sundays. From Monday to Saturday you can see but their busts. 
You may nod to a sheriff's officer on Sunday without entertaining any 
apprehensions as to the piece of paper he may have against you in 
that dismal black leather pocket-book of his. The omnibus roofs are 
covered, the steamboats' decks are crowded, the cabs full, the pave- 
ment thronged, the very saddle-horses bestridden by men who seem of 
a different race to the outside world of the previous four and twenty 
hours. Dirty streets look clean; disreputable streets decorous; and 
thoroughfares that were as still as mice during the week, become 
quite noisy on Sundays with carriage and cab wheels, as sinners of 
wealth and distinction rattle up to the doors of the fashionable chapel. 

It is the privilege of the unique Haymarket to be like its week- 
night self on Sunday ; but in the six mundane days to be a totally dif- 
ferent Haymarket from the street which it becomes immediately after 
midnight. True, by daylight, and during the early part of the evening, 
it is that which it will remain all night : a broad thoroughfare inclining 
slightly downhill northward ; a theatre on its eastern, a colonnaded 
opera-house on its western side ; a thoroughfare containing a sufficiency 



320 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

of shops for the sale of general merchandise, but, predominating above 
these, a crowd of hotels, restaurants, cigar-divans, coffee-houses, and 
establishments for the sale of lobsters, oysters, and pickled salmon, ac- 
cording to the seasons in which those dainties are considered most fit 
to be enjoyed. But it is not the same — no, not at all the same — 
Haymarket to which it will suddenly turn, w T hen the clock of St. 
Martin's church shall proclaim the hour of midnight. The change, 
at first imperceptible, is yet in a moment more immense. As though 
Harlequin had smitten the houses — and the people also — with his 
wand, the whole Haymarket wakes, lights, rises up with a roar, a 
rattle, and a shriek quite pantomimic, if not supernatural. The latter 
image would, I think, be the most vrai semblant. " Hey for fun ! " 
"How are you to-morrow ?" and "How are you?" are the cries 
and the pass-words. The painted Clown (in mosaic jewellery, and all- 
round collar, an astonishing cravat, and a variegated shirt) grins his 
grin and tumbles on the pavement. He is not above stealing an oc- 
casional sausage, bonneting a policeman, overturning an image-boy's 
stock in trade, or throwing the contents of a fish woman's basket about. 
Harlequin in a mask and patchwork-suit is here, there, and every- 
where, conjuring money out of people's pockets, and perpetually pur- 
sued by a vindictive Sprite, habited in the garb of a police constable. 
The lean and slippered Pantaloon hobbles over the flags, and grimaces, 
with his wicked old countenance, beneath the gas-lamps. And Co- 
lumbine, Wallah billah ! Columbine in muslins, spangles, and artificial 
flowers, is here, there, and everywhere, too, and dances her miserable 
jigs to the sorry music of the fife, viol, and tabor, squeaking, scraping, 
and thumping at the gin-shop by the corner of the court. 

Midnight : the play is over, and the audience pour from the Hay- 
market Theatre. The aristocratic opera season is concluded by this 
time of the year, and the lovers of the drama have it all their own way. 
Crowds of jovial young clerks and spruce law students cluster beneath 
the portico, yet convulsed by the humours of Mr. Buckstone. Happy 
families of rosy children, radiant in lay-down collars, white skirts and 
pink sashes, trot from the entrance to the dress-circle under the wing 
of benevolent papa and stout good-humoured mamma, with a white 
burnous, and a tremendous fan ; their healthy countenances all beaming 
and mantling with smiles, and joyously recalling the jokes of that funny 
old man in the farce, or expatiating on the glories of the concluding 
tableau, with its tinsel and gold leaf, its caryatides of ballet girls, and 
its red and blue fire, in Mr. Talfourd's last sparkling burlesque. 



MIDNIGHT. — THE HAYMARKET SUPPER-E003IS. 321 

Happy, happy days and frame of mind, when the theatre can give such 
delights as these. Isn't it better to sit amazed and delighted in the 
front row of the dress-circle, or on the third row of the pit, roaring at 
the stalest Joe Millerisms, and clapping the hands at the tomfool feats 
of tumbling, than to lie perdu in a private-box, now scowling, and 
now sneering, like Stricknine, the great theatrical critic, who will go 
and sup afterwards at the Albion, on an underdone mutton-chop, and, 
calling for pen, ink, and paper, slaughter the inoffensive burlesque 
mercilessly. Stricknine can't write burlesques himself. He can't 
write books ; he can only slaughter, and must have been apprenticed 
in his youth to Bannister or Slater. And, slaughterer as he is, he is 
not equal to the manly business of knocking down a bullock with a 
pole-axe. Give him a long keen knife, and he will puncture the neck 
of a lamb, and that is all. 

Ethelred Guffoon (who has been to three theatres to-night) bustles 
out from his stall with his lorgnette in its shagreen case. Mr. Kick- 
eroe, Q.C., comes from the pit, shouldering his umbrella. Kickeroe 
has been a constant visitor to the pit of the Haymarket any time these 
twenty years, though he could easily afford a private box once if not 
twice a week. His greatest extravagance is to purchase four upper- 
box tickets when Mr. Buckstone takes his benefit. He is an ardent 
admirer of the Haymarket five-act comedies ; and people say that many 
of his most effective and jury-touching perorations have been drawn 
from the sentimental " tags " of the Haymarket dramatists. Trotting 
down the box-stairs, too, comes vivacious, learned, chatty, kindly, 
abusive Mr. Boblink, with his head permaturely white, but his heart 
as green as it was thirty years since. Mr. Boblink is generally 
beloved, though regarded with a humorous terror for his vituperative 
qualities. He expatiates on the necessity of breaking butterflies on 
the wheel, although, good man, he would not harm a particle of pollen 
on their wings. His fierce language is but the bellow of the blunder- 
buss : there is no bullet, not so much as a bit of old hat for wadding in 
his gun. He strikes with a wooden sword, and scourges malefactors 
with a knout whose lash is made of floss-silk. He wears the mask of 
a Gorgon horrible to see ; but the mask is transparent as glass, and you 
may descry the honest genial face of the man wreathed with sly smiles 
behind it. So he goes through life — a bourru hienfaisant — hitting 
men sounding thwacks with a bladder full of peas, and recording 
sentence of literary death against culprits, knowing full well that the 
sentence will never be carried out. To hear Boblink talk, you would 



322 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

think him the most malevolent creature breathing. He is so different 
from smooth, quiet, smiling Mr. Stricknine, {lie only scowls when he is 
alone) who presses your hand warmly, and immediately betakes him- 
self to the Albion, there to make a neat fricassee of your reputation, 
and, in the most polished and classical language, insinuate that you are 
a hopeless fool with dishonest propensities. And yet Mr. Boblink has 
a deadly armoury of his own at home, and knows the tierce and the 
carte and the " raison demonstrative" and has, when exasperated, 
proved himself so cunning of fence, that I would see him hanged before 
I would fight with him in earnest. 

Supper is now the great cry, and the abundant eating and drinking 
resources of the Haymarket are forthwith called into requisition. Bless 
us all ! there must be something very dusty and exhaustive in the 
British drama to make this Haymarket audience so clamorous for sup- 
per. By the ravenous hunger and thirst displayed by the late patrons 
of the theatre, you would imagine that they had gone without dinner 
for a week. You may sup in the Haymarket as your taste would lead, 
or as the state of your finances would counsel — if people followed such 
counsel — you to sup. You may cut your coat according to your cloth. 
Are you rich — there is Dubourg's, the Hotel de Paris, and the up- 
stairs department of the Cafe de T Europe. There is no lack of cunning 
cooks there, I warrant, to send you up pheasants and partridges en 
papillotte ; filets, with mushrooms or truffles, culinary gewgaws that 
shall cost five shillings the dish. Yea, and cellarers will not be want- 
ing to convey to you the Roederer's Champagne, the fragrant Clos 
Vougeot, the refreshing Lafitte, and the enlivening Chambertin with 
yellow seal ; smooth waiters to attend to your minutest wishes, and 
bring you the handsome reckoning on an electro-silver plateau, and, 
with many bows, return you what odd change there may be out of a 
five-pound note. I do not say that the Haymarket contains such gor- 
geous supper-houses as the Maison Doree, the Cafe de Paris, the Cafe 
Anglais, or Vachette's ; but I have seen some notable parties fines 
within its precincts. The Haymarket never was virtuous ; so there is 
never any question about the cakes and ale, and the ginger that is hot 
in the mouth, to be found therein. 

If still your taste leads you towards French cookery — though you 
wince somewhat at the idea of claret, Burgundy, and Champagne to 
follow — there exists a second-class French restaurant or two where 
succulent suppers may be obtained at moderate prices. If unpretend- 
ing chops, steaks, kidneys, sausages, or Welsh rabbit, washed down by 



MIDNIGHT. — THE HAYMARKET SUPPER-BOOMS. 323 

the homely British brown stout, and followed perchance by the sooth- 
ing cigar, and the jorum of hot any thing-and- water : if such be your 
ambition, I should advise you not to sup in the Haymarket at all ; but 
to wait till one o'clock and sup with me. I will show you the where- 
abouts. Such chops and steaks and et ceteras, you may indeed obtain 
in the neighbourhood, but I like them not. If your funds and your 
credit be very low, why, you can enter one of the taverns — if you can 
reach the bar for the crowd of Bacchanalians that are gathered before 
it, and sup on the quarter of a pork pie, a sausage roll, and a Banbury 
cake, washed down by a glass of pale ale ; nay, if you be yet lower in 
pocket, and your available wealth be limited to the possession of the 
modest and retiring penny, you may, at the doors of most of the taverns, 
meet with an ancient dame, of unpretending appearance, bearing a fiat 
basket lined with a fair white cloth. She for your penny will admi- 
nister to you a brace of bones, covered with a soft white integument, 
which she will inform you are " trotters.'' There is not much meat 
on them ; but they are very toothsome and succulent. It is no busi- 
ness of yours to inquire whether these be sheep's trotters or pigs' 
trotters, or the trotters of corpulent rats or overgrown mice. They 
are trotters. Look not the gift-horse in the mouth ; for the penny was 
perhaps a gift, however strictly you may have purchased the trotters. 
Eat them, and thank heaven, and go thy ways, and take a cooling 
drink at the nearest pump with an iron ladle chained to it, which is, 
if I am not mistaken, over-against St. James's Church in Piccadilly. 
Or, perhaps you are fond of ham-sandwiches. The unpretending dame 
with the basket will straightway vend you two slices of a pale sub- 
stance, resembling in taste and texture sawdust pressed into a concrete 
form, between which is spread a veneer of inorganic matter, having 
apparently a strong affinity to salted logwood. This is ham! The 
concrete sawdust is bread ! The whole is a sandwich ! These luxuries 
are reckoned very nice by some persons, and quite strengthening. 

Or, " another way," as old Mrs. Glasse says in her cookery book. 
At the Coventry Street extremity of the Haymarket stands that cele- 
brated and long-established institution known as the Royal Albert 
Potato Can. At that three-legged emporium of smoking vegetables, 
gleaming with block tin painted red, and brazen ornaments, the hum- 
ble pilgrim of the Haymarket may halt and sup for a penny. For a 
penny ? What say I ? for a halfpenny even, may the belated and im- 
poverished traveller obtain a refreshment at once warm 5 farinaceous, 
and nourishing. Garnish your potato, when the Khan of the Hay- 



324 TWICE HOTTED THE CLOCK. 

market has taken him from his hot blanket-bed, and cut him in two — 
garnish him with salt and pepper, eschew not those condiments, they 
are harmless, nay, stimulating ; but ho ! my son, beware of the butter! 
it is confusion. Better a dry potato and a contented mind, than 
dreadful Irish salt grease — for butter I dare not call it, which may 
give you a bilious attack that will last for a month. 

I should like to know what has been the use of my recommending 
these various grades of supper to you, from the lordly Cafe de 1' Europe 
to the humble Potato Can, when I should have known all along, and 
as it were intuitively, that your mind was bent upon oysters, and that 
oysters after the play you were determined to have. Come along, 
then, a' goodness' name, and if oysters are to be the order of the night, 
e'en let us have them. 

The London oyster, or rather shell and cured fish shop, for the sale 
of lobsters, crabs, pickled and kippered salmon, bloaters, and dried 
sprats, is combined with that of the delicious molluscs of which so 
many thousands are nightly consumed ; the London oyster-shop, and 
particularly the Haymarket one, stands, and is a thing apart, among 
the notabilia of this metropolis. You know how the French eat 
oysters. There is the belle ecaillere, generally a hideous old woman of 
about sixty, with a snuffy-looking pocket-handkerchief twisted round 
her head, who sits at the restaurant door amid a grove of oyster-shells 
and hanks of straw, and, in the intervals of oyster- opening, darns 
worsted stockings. The nimble g argons come skipping from the 
gilded saloons of the restaurant within, and demand their required 
dozens and half-dozens from the ecaillere without. The bearded fre- 
quenters of the restaurant evidently think it an epicurean and fashion- 
able thing to commence, or rather precede dinner, by swallowing so 
many oysters. There are enterprising bon vivants who will even go so 
far as their two dozen : but I dissent from them, for three reasons ; 
The first, that, in my opinion, oysters should be eaten either alone — = 
of themselves, by themselves, or for themselves— or that they should 
be consumed full twenty minutes before the repast ; for the second, 
that all French oysters, whether of Ostend, Maremnes, or Canale, are 
to me utterly abominable, having — even when they are fresh, which 
is seldom — a certain coppery flavour, superlatively nauseous ; for the 
third, that in the best French restaurants, it is difficult, if not impos- 
sible, to procure Cayenne pepper ; and, without that rubicund condi- 
ment, I would give no more for the best " natives " than for a plate of 
cold boiled veal without salt. The ecaillere element is the only 



MIDNIGHT. — THE HAY MARKET SUPPER-ROOMS. 



325 




326 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

one prevalent in France relative to the sale of oysters, and the 
consumers pick them off the shells with little silver pitchforks, 
squeeze lemon over them, and eat them daintily in many mouthfuls: 
Fie upon such miminy-piminy ways ! Oyster-shops the French don't 
seem to understand at all. At Chevet's, that vast comestible shop in 
the Palais Royal, they keep oysters, and lobsters, and prawns, and 
shrimps — keep them as a show in the windows for a week or two, 
when, their novelty beginning to wear off, they are disposed of, I pre- 
sume, to the nobility and gentry. They tell a story of a Frenchman, 
who hoarded up his money, in order to purchase un homard magnifique, 
which he had seen at Chevet's, and to which he had taken a fancy. 

Americans tell me that though the oyster attains high perfection, 
and is held in culinary reverence as high, in the States, anything 
resembling our Haymarket oyster- shop is not to be found in New 
York. But on Broadway Pavement, during the gay night, brilliant 
lamps, sometimes coloured in fantastic devices, invite you to enter un- 
derground temples of oyster-eating. These are called oyster-cellars. 
Some are low and disreputable enough, and not impassible to imputa- 
tions of gouging, bowie-kniving, and knuckle- dusting ; but others are 
really magnificent suites of apartments, decorated with mirrors and 
chandeliers, and glowing with gilding, mahogany, and crimson velvet; 
and here you may consume oysters as small as periwinkles or as large 
as cheese-plates — oysters of strange and wondrous flavours — oysters 
with bizarre and w ell-nigh unpronounceable names — oysters cooked in 
ways the most marvellous and multifarious : stewed, broiled, fried, 
scolloped, barbacued, toasted, grilled, and made hot in silver chafing 
dishes like the delicious preparation known as " despatch lobster." 
You wash down suppers in oyster-cellars such as these with Hock and 
Champagne ; yet for all the splendour and the rarity of the cooking, 
and the variety of oysters, I will abide by the Haymarket oyster-shop, 
rude, simple, primitive as it is, with its peaceful concourse of cus- 
tomers taking perpendicular refreshment at the counter, plying the 
unpretending pepper-castor, and the vinegar-cruet with the perforated 
cork, calling cheerfully for crusty bread and pats of butter ; and, 
tossing off foaming pints of brownest stout, (pale ale-— save in bottles, 
and of the friskiest description — is, with oysters, a mistake) content- 
edly wipe their hands on the jack-towel on its roller afterwards. 

As in this real life of ours, Old Age and Infancy often meet on 
neutral ground, and the prattle of the child goes forth with hand out- 



MIDNIGHT. — THE SUB-EDITOR'S BOOM. 327 

stretched to meet the graybeard's maundering : so, oh reader, do I 
find the beginning and the end of these papers drawing closer and 
closer together. Ere many hours they will meet ; and their conjunc- 
tion shall be the signal for their decay. You will remember how, 
when the day was very young, the morning scarce swaddled, and 
kicking in his cradle with encrimsoned heels (Aurora, the nurse, had 
chafed them), we visited a great newspaper office, and saw the publi- 
cation of the monster journal. Now, when midnight itself is fallen 
into the sere and yellow, we stand once more within the precincts of 
journalism. This is not, however, the monster journal that has all 
Printing House Square to roar and rattle in. No : our office is in the 
Strand. We are free of the charmed domains. We pass up a nar- 
row court running by the side of the office, push aside a heavy door, 
ascend the creaking staircase, and discreetly tapping at a door, this 
time covered with green baize, find ourselves in the presence of Mr. 
Limberly, the sub-editor of the " Daily Wagon," 

Let us cast a glance round the room. What a litter it is in, to be 
sure ! what piles of newspapers, home and country ones, mangled and 
disembowelled by the relentless scissors, cumber the floor ! More 
newspapers on shelves — old files, these — more on the table ; letters 
opened and unopened, wet proof-sheets, files of " copy," books for 
review, just sent by the publishers, or returned by the reviewers, after 
they have duly demolished the contents and the authors. And all 
about the room are great splashes and dried-up pools of ink, and the 
ceiling is darkened with the smoke of innumerable candles — gas was, 
until very lately, considered anything but orthodox in a newspaper 
office, and many sub-editors still find its sharp, harsh, flickering^ 
though brilliant light, far inferior to the honest, though evil- smelling, 
old tallow-candles, in their tin sconces and japanned shades. The 
" Daily Wagon," be it understood, is a newspaper of the good old 
Conservative way of thinking — no Liberal notions, or humbug of that 
sort : Church and State, strict constitutional and social discipline 
(including game-laws, religious disabilities, church-rates, unequal 
taxation, rural justices' justice, and flogging in the army and schools) 
— the True Blue British line of politics, in fact. Thus situated, the 
" Wagon," one of whose proprietors is said to be a peer, another a 
bishop, and a third a brewer — nothing could be more respectable — 
sticks to its old office, its old rooms, and its old staff. The two 
former have not been painted within the memory of man; though it 
must be admitted that the latter wash quite as frequently as the 



328 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

employes of the "Morning Cracker," with its bran-new offices, its 
bran-new furniture, its bran-new type, paper, machines, writers — 
bran-new everything but ideas. The " Daily Wagoners " affect to 
sneer at the " Morning Cracker," which, in its turn, laughs the 
" Wagon " to scorn ; but both combine in abusing the monster journal 
of Printing House Square. " Wagoner " and "Cracker" are both 
high-priced journals. So, of course, they both feel bound to ignore 
even the existence of a journal called the " Daily Bombshell," which 
somehow manages to keep up a better staff of writers, and a larger 
establishment, to give fresher news, more accurate intelligence, more 
interesting correspondence, and reflections on public events incom- 
parably more powerful, than its high-priced contemporaries, all for 
the small sum of one penny. The "Wagon "and the "Cracker" 
are in a chronic state of rage at the " Bombshell," though they pre- 
tend to ignore its existence ; but one day the bishop who is interested 
in the "Wagon," hearing that the circulation of the abhorred 
" Bombshell " exceeded fifty thousand, while that of his own beloved 
journal fluctuated between five and seven hundred, drove down in 
almost delirious encitement to the offices of the "Wagon" — drove 
down in his own carriage, with his mitre on the panels — and suggested 
to Mr. Fitzfluke, the editor, that the price of the paper should forth- 
with come down to one penny. But Mr. Fitzfluke shook his head in 
respectful deprecation of the proposition, and summoned to his aid 
Mr. Limberly, who likewise shook his head, and whispered the magic 
word " advertisements." A grand consultation between the proprie- 
tors took place next day, whereat the brewer came out in a rabidly ■ 
conservative point of view, and declared, striking a leathern-covered 
table, that he would sooner see his own "Entire " retailed at a penny 
a pint, than submit to an imitation in price of the " rubbishing 
prints " of a set of " dam radicals." So the " Daily Wagon " keeps 
up its price, and manages to crawl on in a tortoise-like manner, 
supported by its advertisements. It sleeps a good deal, and doesn't 
w r ant much to eat; and will bear being trodden on, stumbled 
over, nay, occasionally jumped upon, without seeming in the least 
to mind it. 

Mr. Limberly sits, then, in his sub-editorial throne — an unpre- 
tending cane-bottomed arm-chair — surrounded by his attaches and 
myrmidons, his good men and true. The electric telegraph messenger 
— a spruce lad in the not unbecoming uniform of that recently-formed 
corps— has just arrived, bearing a message which may announce either 



MIDNIGHT. — THE SUB-EDITOR's ROOM. 



329 




330 TWICE EOTJND THE CLOCK. 

war in the East or Peace in China, either a fluctuation in the funds at 
St. Petersburg, or a murder at Haverfordwest ; either the wreck of a 
steamer, with all hands lost, on the north-west coast of Ireland, or 
the arrival in the Mersey of a clipper ship from Australia, with a few 
score thousand ounces of gold in her treasure-room, to say nothing of 
the nuggets, the gold dust, and the bankers' receipts in the pockets of 
her wide-awake-hatted passengers. But all is fish that comes to Mr. 
Limberly's net. Leading article and literary criticism, theatrical 
notices and prices of railway and mining shares, advertisements and 
letters from eulogistic or indignant correspondents, telegrams and 
foreign tittle-tattle, fires, murders, fatal accidents, coroners' inquests, 
enormous gooseberries, showers of frogs, the acceptances of the St. 
Leger, and the prices of hops in the Borough Market : he looks 
upon all these items but as so much " copy," for which the master 
printer is waiting, and which are required to fill the ever-yawning 
columns of the " Daily Wagon." Snipping and pasting, extracting, 
excising, revising, and correcting, Mr. Limberly will work late into 
the night and early into the morning ; but he will not dream of re- 
tiring to rest till the paper itself be "put to bed," — -i.e., laid on the 
printing machine for the requisite number of copies to be struck off; 
and even then he will probably go and smoke a cigar at the " Crimson 
Hippopotamus," in the Strand, hard by — the great house of call for 
morning journalists — before he hails his matutinal cab, the driver of 
which waits for him on the stand, and looks out for him quite as a 
regular customer, and rattles over Waterloo Bridge to his well-de- 
served bed. 



ONE O'CLOCK A.M.— EVANS'S SUPPER-ROOMS, 

AND A FIRE. 

Ik the bleak, timbery city of Copenhagen, so terribly maltreated at the 
commencement of the century by Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B. ; in 
that anything-but-agreeable capital of Denmark, where raw turnips 
sliced in brandy form a favourite whet before dinner, — where they 
blacklead (apparently) the stairs in the houses, and three-fourths of 
every apartment are sacrificed to the preposterous exigencies of the 



ONE A.M. — EVANS S SXJPPEK-KOOMS. 331 

Stove ; where the churches are mostly of wood, and the streets are 
paved with a substance nearly resembling petrified kidney potatoes ; 
in Copenhagen, then, I formed, some thirty months since, a transient 
acquaintance with an old gentleman in green spectacles. He was a 
Dane, formerly commercial, now retired from business. He came 
every day, and with unvarying regularity, to take his post-prandial 
coffee and petit verre in the speise saal of the hotel then afflicted with 
my custom : he generally indulged in the refreshment by dipping a 
large lump of sugar in the hot liquid, sucking it, replenishing it, oc- 
casionally replacing the lump, till the cup was emptied ; and he snuffed 
eternally. These are not such peculiar characteristics of a foreign 
gentleman that I have any special cause to dwell upom them here ; 
but as the hotel was very empty, and I was very dull, I made this old 
gentleman- — as my incorrigible habit is — a study and a theme. I con- 
verted him into a mental clothes-prop, and hung an infinity of fan- 
tastic notions, theories, and speculations upon him. We soon became, 
thanks to the French language and constant proximity, tolerably good 
friends. Of course the old gentleman did not delay long in asking me 
why I had come to Copenhagen. That question is invariably asked 
you — ad nauseam, too — throughout the North of Europe. They begin 
at Hamburg, continue at Berlin, return to it in Denmark and Sweden, 
and end at St. Petersburg. If a man be not a commercial traveller, 
or a diplomatist, a spy, or a negotiator of forged bank-notes, these 
Northern people seem utterly bewildered as to his object in coming 
to such latitudes. The Rhine, the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, the 
Holy Land, Switzerland, the Tyrol, good ; but the North : que diable ! 
what does he want in that galley ? I confess that I was somewhat at 
a loss to give a straightforward answer to the old gentleman in green 
spectacles. I might have told him that I had come to see the birth- 
place of Hans Christian Anderson ; but then I was not quite certain 
as to whether that delightful Danish writer first drew breath in Copen- 
hagen. It would have been equally disingenuous to have adduced a 
wish to see the famous Thorwaldsen's Museum as the reason for my 
visit ; for with shame I acknowledge that, having no guide-book with 
me, I had entirely forgotten that the Danish metropolis contained that 
triumph of plastic art. It is true that, by attentive study of the 
glorious museum, I subsequently atoned for my mnemonic shortcom- 
ings. So, being on the horns of a dilemma, I elected to tell the truth 
— not a bad plan under any circumstances — and said that I had come 
to Copenhagen for the simple reason that I did not know what to do 



332 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

with myself, and would have gone with equal alacrity to Nova Zembla 
or to Katamandu ; which candid avowal placed me on a most confi- 
dential footing with the old gentleman in green spectacles, and mate- 
rially assisted the progress of our intercourse. 

Now, whatever can this Danish old gentleman and his verdant 
spectacles have to do with One o' Clock in the morning, and Evans's 
Supper-rooms ? You must have patience, and you shall hear. In 
subsequent chatty interviews, it came out that the old gentleman had 
once upon a time — a very long while ago, more than a quarter of a 
century — been in England. His reminiscences of our country were 
very dim and indistinct by this time. His knowledge of the English 
language, I take it, had not at any time been very extensive, and it 
was reduced now to a few phrases and interjections ; some trifling 
oaths, a few facetious party-cries, current, I presume, at the time of 
his visit, and having, mainly, reference to Catholic Emancipation and 
the Reform Bill ; these, with some odds and ends of tattered conver- 
sation, formed his philological stock in trade. But, even as " single- 
speech Hamilton" had his solitary oration, Mrs. Dubsy's hen her one 
chick, and Major Panton his unique run of luck at the card-table, so 
my old gentleman had his one story which he persisted in delivering 
in English. It was a mysterious and almost incomprehensible legend ; 
and began thus : " 'Ackney Rod ! Aha !" Then he would snuff and 
suck his lump of sugar, and I would look on wonderingly. Then he 
would explain matters a little. " 'Ackney Rod. I live there so long 
time ago. Aha ! " This would lead to a renewed series of snuffings 
and suckings, and he would proceed — " Vontleroy he not 'ang. He 
rich man, banquier in America. He 'ang in a sospender basket. Aha ! " 
For the life of me, I could not for a long time understand the drift 
about " Vontleroy" and the "sospender basket;" but at length a 
light broke in upon me, and I began to comprehend that this won- 
drous legend related to Henry Fauntleroy, the banker, who was hanged 
at Newgate for forgery, and concerning whose apocryphal rescue from 
strangulation — by the means, according to some, of a silver tube in 
his windpipe, and, according to others, of an apparatus of wicker- 
work, which, suspending him from the w r aist, so took the strain off his 
neck — rumours were current at the time of his death and for a con- 
siderable period afterwards. " This cock-and-bull story was well-nigh 
all the poor man could recollect about England, and he decidedly 
made the most of it. 

And, after all, I have only introduced him as a species of gentle- 



ONE A.M. EVANS S SUPPER-ROOMS. 333 

man-usher to another foreign acquaintance — with whom my inter- 
course was even more transient, for I met him but once in my life, and 
then had only about seven minutes' conversation with him on the deck 
of a steamer — whose knowledge of English and recollection of Eng- 
land were even more limited. " Ver fine place," he remarked, refer- 
ring to my native land. " Moch night plaisir, London. Sing-song ver 
good. Ev'ns magnifique." There, the secret of my digression is out 
now, and I land you — somewhat wearied with the journey, it may be 
— under the Piazza of Covent Garden Market. 

Mr. Charles Dickens once declared in print that were he to start 
a horse for the Derby, he would call that horse Fortnum and Mason : 
the delightful hampers of edibles and drinkables vended by that emi- 
nent firm about the period of Epsom Races being connected with the 
most pleasurable of his impressions concerning that exciting sporting 
event* I have no doubt that my steamboat acquaintance was not by 
any means solitary in his enthusiastic estimate of the "magnifique" 
nature of Ev'ns, or Evans's, and its " sing-song;" and his opinion is, 
I have reason to believe, shared by many hundreds of English country 
gentlemen who patronise the Bedford, the Tavistock, the Hummums, 
and other kindred Covent Garden hotels, and who at Evans's find 
their heartiest welcome and their most inexhaustible fund of amuse- 
ment. Nor can I see myself, exactly, how this great town of ours 
could manage to get on without the time-honoured Cave of Harmony ; 
for be it known to all men — at least to so many as do not know it 
already — Evans's, though Captain Costigan is no longer permitted to 
sing his songs there, and even Colonel Newcome, were he to volunteer 
to oblige the company with a song, would be politely requested to 
desist by a waiter — is the " Cave," and the " Cave " is Evans's. It is 
not without a certain sly chuckle of gratulation that I record this fact. 
Those friends of mine who have adopted the highly honourable pur- 
suit of hiding round corners in order to throw, with the greater secu- 
rity, jagged stones at me as I pass, those precious purists and imma- 
culate precisians who cry hard upon a writer on London life in the 
nineteenth century, because he describes things and places which 
every man knows to exist, and whose existence he for one has not the 
hypocrisy to deny — these good gentlemen will scarcely be angry with 
their poor servant, Scriblerus, for giving a word-picture of a place of 
amusement which is immortalised in the first chapter of " The New- 
comes." And please to observe, gentlemen, that I am not about to 
venture on the very delicate ground with respect to the quality of the 



334 TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 

songs once sung at Evans's, and so boldly trodden by Mr. Thackeray. 
I have the less need to do so, as that delicate or indelicate ground has 
long since — and to the honour of the present proprietor, Mr. Green-^- 
been ploughed up and sown with salt, and the musical programme 
rendered as innocuous as the bill of fare of a festival in a cathedral 
town, 

And now for the place itself. About a century since, when the 
shadowy hero of the " Virginians" was beating the town with my 
Lords Castlewood and March, and Parson Sampson, and his black man 
Gumbo was flirting w T ith Colonel Lambert's servant-maids ; about a 
century since, when in reality Johnson — not so long since emancipated 
from sleeping on bulks with that other homeless wretch, and man of 
genius, Savage — was painfully finishing his gigantic w T ork, the " Dic- 
tionary;" when Goldsmith was "living in Axe Lane among the 
beggars," or starving in Green Arbour Court ; when honest Hogarth 
dwelt at the sign of the Golden Head, in Leicester Fields (he had set 
up his coach by this time, worthy man, was Serjeant-painter to the 
King, and had his country-house at Chiswick) ; when the wicked, witty 
Wilkes was carousing with other " choice spirits" as wicked and as 
witty as he, at Medmenham Abbey ; when the furious Churchill was 
astonishing the town with his talent and his excesses ; when Lawrence 
Sterne was yet fiddling, and painting, and preaching, w T hile his friend 
Hall indited the " Crazy Tales ;" when George II., hitherto considered 
as a heavy, morose German king, who did not like " boetry and baint- 
ing," and could not see the fun of the " March to Finchiey," but now 
for the first time revealed to us by Mr. Carlyle as a dapper, conse- 
quential little coxcomb — the " mein briider der comodiant" " my 
brother the playactor" of Friedrich-Wilhelm, w r as Sovereign of Great 
Britain, by the grace of the Act of Settlement and the madness of the 
Stuarts — this town of London was full of choice holes and corners, 
known under the generic name of " night cellars." You may see in 
Liverpool to this day — and I am told, also, in New York — some 
flourishing specimens of these inviting localities, but they have almcst 
died out in London. The White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly is now 
a booking-office ; the Shades in Leicester Square (underneath Saville 
House), once Pennant's " pouting house for princes," is a restaurant ; 
the cellar of the Ship at Charing Cross is yet a tavern, but is used 
more as a waiting-room for passengers by the Kent Road and Deptford 
omnibuses ; and a whole nest of cellars w r ere swept away by the 
Adamses when the Adelphi Terrace, with a worse range of cellars 



ONE AM. — EVANS S SUFPEK-ROOMS. 335 

beneath, as it afterwards turned out, was constructed. But the night 
cellars of a hundred years ago ! What dens, what sinks, what roaring 
saturnalia of very town scoundrelism they must have been ! We have 
but two reliable authorities extant as to their manners and appear- 
ance : Hogarth's prints, and the pages of the Old Bailey Sessions 
Papers. The former are the engraven testimony of a man to whose 
honest nature it was utterly abhorrent and intolerable to bear false 
witness ; the latter is a record that cannot lie. I don't mean by these 
Sessions Papers the collection of trials known as the " Nev^gate 
Calendar." In these, crimes are dressed up with all manner of 
romantic and adventitious details, and occasionally spiced with moral 
reflections by the ordinary of Xewgate. I mean the real Sessions 
Papers, the verbatim reports of the trials — from murder to pot-stealing 
— taken officially in short-hand by the Gurneys and their predecessors, 
and which, in their matchless extenso, remain, to the inestimable 
advantage of our historians and our painters of manners. They date 
from the time of Judge Jeffreys, to the last session of the Central 
Criminal Court— it may have been the clay before yesterday. 

The cellars come out with a perfectly livid radiance in the reports 
of these trials. You see the " brimstone" woman, whom Hogarth 
pointed out to his friend and sketched upon his thumbnail, spurting 
brandy from her mouth at the enraged virago her companion. You 
see Kate Hackabout passing the stolen watch to Tom Idle, who is 
under the unseen surveillance of one of Justice de Veil or Harry 
Fielding's runners, and the luckless Thomas will be laid by the heels 
by daybreak to-morrow. Kate will go to Bridewell, there to be 
whipped and to pick oakum. Foote's Mother Cole is here, you may 
be sure ; and Tom Rakewell. spending his last guineas among the gam- 
blers and ruffians. Who else are there r Ferdinand Count Fathom, 
you may sure ; poets and hack-writers — for Grub Street existed then 
in spirit and in truth — making my lord's gold pieces, which he gave 
for that last foolishly-fulsome dedication, fly. Yes : Mr. Peregrine 
Pickle, and you are spending your night in the cellar. And Mr. 
Thomas Jones, fresh from the western counties, — you, too, are here, 
with a laced coat bought out of my Lady Bellaston's last bank-note. 
Ah ! Thomas ! Thomas ! if pure-minded Sophy Western could but 
see you in this bad place, among these ruffianly companions ! — among 
horse-jockeys, highwaymen-captains, unfrocked parsons; deboshed 
adventurers, redolent of twopenny ordinaries and Mount Scoundrel in 
the Fleet ; disbanded lieutenants of phantom regiments : scriveners 



336 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

struck off the rolls, ruined spendthrifts, Irish desperadoes enthusiastic 
for the Pretender and other men's pence, bankrupt traders, French 
and Italian rascals flagrant from the galleys of foreign seaports, and 
all, according to their own showing, distressed patriots; German 
swindlers and card- sharpers, who declare themselves to be Counts of 
the Holy Roman Empire, Jew coin-clippers and diamond-slicers, river- 
side vagabonds in the pay of the commanders of press-gangs on the 
look-out for benighted journeymen, or dissolute lads who have run 
away from their apprenticeship or quarrelled with their parents, 
recruiting crimps for both sexes, usurers looking for prodigals who 
have yet money to lose, bailiffs' followers looking for prodigals who 
have lost all and owe more ; and, scattered among all this scum of 
frantic knavery and ragabosh, some gay young sprigs of aristocracy, 
some officers in the regiment of Guards, some noisy young country 
squires of the Western type. This, all garnished with dirt and spilt 
liquors, with the fumes of mum, Geneva, punch, wine, and tobacco 
smoke, with oaths and shrieks and horrid songs, with the clatter of 
glasses and tankards, the clash of rapiers and verberations of bludgeons 
— is the London night cellar of a hundred years ago. Round Covent 
Garden such places positively swarmed. The Strand, the neighbour- 
hood of Exeter 'Change, Long Acre, and Drury Lane, reeked with 
dens of this description. For hereabouts were the playhouses, and in 
their purlieus, as in those of cathedrals, you must expect to find, and 
do find, in every age, the haunts of vice and dissipation. It may be 
profane to say u hi apis ibi mel : but such is the sorry fact. 

I am to give you notice that this article was originally intended to 
be intensely topographical— nay, sant soit pen, antiquarian and archaeo- 
logical. It was my desire to give you a minute description of the hos- 
telry called Evans's Hotel, and whose basement contains the saloon 
known as Evans's supper-room, from the earliest period of authentic 
research to the present time. How it emerged from a state of brawl- 
ing night-cellarhood, to the dignity of a harmonic meeting ; who first 
ordered " chops to follow," and what ingenious spirit originally sug- 
gested the curious principle now in practice, of paying for your refresh- 
ment at the door on quitting the establishment ; who instituted the 
glee-choir, introduced books of the words, and discovered that baked 
potatoes are necessarily associated with bumpers of stout, poached 
eggs, and liberally cayenned kidneys ; who formed the gallery of por- 
traits which now graces the walls of the ante-saloon, and who first 
dreamed of such an Arabian Night's succedaneum as a ladies' gallery. 



ONE A.M. — EVANS S SUPPER-BOOMS. 337 

All these things it was my firm intention to record, in Roman type, for 
your amusement, if not your edification. " Who knows," I asked my- 
self enthusiastically, " if I take sweet counsel (hot and strong as well 
as sweet, sometimes) of Mr. Paddy Green, most urbane of nocturnal 
Bonifaces, and sit reverentially at the feet of Mr. Peter Cunningham, 
who, it is rumoured, in the matter of London localities, could, an he 
chose, rival the marvellous feat of memory ascribed to old Fuller of 
the ' Worthies,' who could repeat backwards, and without book, the 
names of all the tavern signs on both sides of the way from Temple 
Bar to Ludgate : who knows," I repeated, " but that I shall be able to 
submit to the readers of ' Twice Round the Clock,' a copy of an unpaid 
score left by Oliver Goldsmith at some Evans's of the past ; or put it 
upon record that Sir Thomas Lawrence and Major Hanger had claret- 
cup together here, on the night that Thurtell w T as hanged, or that on 
the fatal evening when the Catholic Bill passed the Lords, a live bishop 
— a hackney coachman's many-caped coat over his apron and shorts — 
descended Evans's well-worn stairs, ordered a Welsh rabbit, partook 
of two c stouts,' and, the tears coursing down his right reverend cheeks, 
murmured — ' Britain ! oh my country ! Delenda est Carthago ! 9 by way 
of chorus to Captain Costigan's favourite ditty of ' The Night before 
Larry w T as stretched ? ' " 

In the famous gardens of the Villa Pallavicini, near Genoa, there is 
an artificial piece of water winding between rocks, at the extremity of 
which the mimic river seems to lose itself in the blue w T aters of the 
Mediterranean. Nothing of the sort is the case : the sea is, in reality, 
more than three hundred yards distant ; but the intervening ground 
has been so dexterously sloped and masked w r ith groups of plants, that 
the optical delusion is marvellous. Of such are the aspirations of 
mankind. In such disappointment ended my castles in the air with 
respect to Evans's. It w r as from across the ocean that I had to respond 
to the printers' wail for " copy : " this article was commenced in view 
of the Castle of Rolandseck, on board a Rhine steamer, whose worn- 
out engines throbbed as irregularly as though they had palpitation of 
the heart. It is being continued now at the sea- side, in bed, gruel on 
the one side, sweet spirits of nitre on the other : and where it will be 
finished, who can tell ? Old iEsop told the soldiers, when they asked 
him w r hither he was going, that he did not know, whereupon they 
arrested him for an impertinent. " Was I not right ? " he cried ; 
" did I know that I was going to jail ? " " Salt on ou Von va?" echoes 
Diderot, How do I, how do you, how does your lordship, how does 



338 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

your grace, how does your majesty, know what will happen the mo- 
ment after this ? Therefore, take heed of the present time, and make 
your wills : the best will, in my humble thinking, that a man can 
make, being that strong will and determination to act as justly as he 
can in each moment in the which he is permitted to live. 

So you understand, now, why I was compelled to dispense with 
the assistance of Mr. Paddy Green and Mr. Peter Cunningham, and 
why I am reduced to a dependence on my own personal reminiscences 
with respect to Evans's, without the adventitious aid of recondite 
anecdote and historical data. Here is the place as I remember it. 

One o'clock in the morning. Of course we are supposed to be 
spending just a fortnight in town, and putting up at the Bedford, or it 
would never do to be so early-late abroad. We have been to the play, 
and have consumed a few oysters in the Haymarket ; but the principal 
effect of that refreshment seems to have been to make us ten times 
hungrier. The delicate bivalves of Colchester have failed in appeasing 
our bucolic stomachs. We require meat. So, says the friend most 
learned in the ways of the town to his companion — " Meat at our 
hotel we eschew, for we shall find the entertainment of the dearest 
and dullest. We will go sup at Evans's, for there we can have good 
meat and good liquor at fair rates, and hear a good song besides." 
Whereupon we walk till the piazza, about which I have kept you so 
long lingering, looms in sight. A low doorway, brilliantly lit with 
gas, greets our view. We descend a flight of some steps, pass through 
a vestibule, and enter the " Cave of Harmony." 

Push further on, if you please. You are not to linger in this ante- 
chamber, thickly hung with pictures, and otherwise, with its circular 
marble tables, much resembling a Parisian cafe, minus the mirrors 
and the rattle of the dominoes. This ante-chamber will be treated of 
anon ; but your present business is with chops and harmony. 

Passing, then, through this atrium, the visitor finds himself in a 
vast music-hall, of really noble proportions, and decorated not only 
with admirable taste, but with something nearly akin to splendour. 
You see I am at a loss for authorities again, and I cannot tell you how 
much of the hall is Corinthian, and how much composite ; whether 
the columns are fluted, the cornices gilt or the soffits carved, and 
whether the Renaissance or the Arabesque style most prevails in the 
decorations employed. All I know is, that it is a lofty, handsome, 
comfortable room, whose acoustic properties, by the way, are far 
superior to those enjoyed by some establishments w r ith loftier phil- 



ONE A.M. — EVANS S STJPPER-ROGjIS. 339 

harmonic pretensions. At the northern extremity of the hall is a 
spacious proscenium and stage, with the grand pianoforte de rigueur, 
the whole veiled by a curtain in the intervals of performance. As for 
the huge area stretching from the proscenium to a row of columns 
which separate it from the ante-chamber cafe, it is occupied by parallel 
lines of tables, which, if they do not groan beneath the weight of good 
eatables and drinkables piled upon them, might certainly be excused 
for groaning— to say nothing of shrieking, yelling, and uttering other 
lamentable noises, evoked by the unmerciful thumping and hammer- 
ing they undergo at the conclusion of every fresh exercitation of 
harmony. 

Still, the eatables and drinkables do merit a paragraph, and shall 
have one. To the contemplative mind they are full of suggestions, and 
evidence of the vast digestive powers of the English people. To any 
but a race of hardy Norsemen, sons of Thor and Odin, hammerers of 
steel, welders of iron, and compellers of adverse elements, men who 
are sometimes brought to live when on shipboard upon weevily biscuit 
that breaks the teeth, and salted leather, humorously nicknamed beef: 
or in trenches, upon rancid pork, toasted on bayonet or ramrod tips ; 
to any but that unconquerable, hard-headed, and strong-stomached 
people, of whom it is sometimes said that they would eat a donkey if 
they were allowed to begin at the hind legs, this post-midnight repast 
at Evans's would be full of menace of perturbed slumbers, distraught 
dreams, nay, even ghastly nightmares. Your Frenchman, when he 
sups, takes his cold salad, his appetising fruit, his succulent partridge, 
his light omelette, or, at most, his thin weak bouillon, with a lean cut- 
let to follow. He drinks sugar-and- water, wine-and- water, or, on 
high holiday nights, a glass or two of champagne ; puffs his mild 
cigars, and goes to bed, simpering that he has bien soupe. And even 
then, sometimes, your Frenchman has dreams, and rising in bed, with 
the hair of his flesh standing up, vows that he will sup no more. 
Your Italian sups on his three-halfpennyworth of maccaroni. Your 
Spaniard rubs a piece of bread with garlic, and eats it, blesses heaven, 
and goes to sleep with a cigarette in his mouth. Your gross German 
affects the lighter kind of cold meats and salads at supper, and washes 
down his spare repast — to be sure, it is the fourth within the twelve 
hours — with some frothy beer. The Americans can't be said to sup, 
any more than they breakfast, lunch, or dine. They are always over- 
eating, over-drinking, and over-smoking themselves ; and were it not 
for their indomitable pluck and perseverance, their tendency to dys- 



340 TWICE EOUND THE CLOCK. 

pepsia would be an insurmountable obstacle to their ever becoming a 
great people. For the great peoples have always had strong stomachs. 
Homer's heroes ate beef undone. When the Romans took to made- 
dishes and kick-shaws, then came their decadence, and the strong- 
stomached barbarians of the North overran them. To make an end of 
foreign wanderings, Russian suppers, among the people, are just no 
suppers at all. One — or at most two — meals a day, is the rule with 
the moujik. In elegant society, the cook might as well provide for 
supper painted chickens and lobster salads made of sealing-wax and 
cut paper, as any genuine viands. A supper at St. Petersburg, means 
champagne and gambling till the next morning. 

But see the suppers set forth for the strong-stomached supporters 
of Evans's. See the pyramids of dishes arrive ; the steaming succes- 
sion of red-hot chops, with their brown, frizzling caudal appendages 
sobbing hot tears of passionate fat. See the serene kidneys unsub- 
dued, though grilled, smiling though cooked, weltering proudly in 
their noble gravy, like warriors who have fallen upon the field of 
honour. See the hot yellow lava of the Welsh rabbit stream over 
and engulf the timid toast. Sniff the fragrant vapour of the corpulent 
sausage. Mark how the russet leathern- coated baked potato at first 
defies the knife, then gracefully cedes, and through a lengthened gash 
yields its farinaceous effervescence to the influence of butter and cat- 
sup. The only refreshments present open to even a suspicion of ef- 
feminacy are the poached eggs, glistening like suns in a firmament of 
willow-pattern plate ; and those too, I am willing to believe, are only 
taken by country-gentlemen hard pressed by hunger, just to " stay 
their stomachs/' while the more important chops and kidneys are 
being prepared. The clouds of pepper shaken out on these viands 
are enough to make Slawkenbergius sneeze for a fortnight ; the cat- 
sup and strong sauces poured over them are sufficient to convince Sir 
Toby Belch that there are other things besides ginger, which are apt 
to be " hot i' the mouth," and, as humble servitors in attendance on 
these haughty meats, are unnumbered discs of butter, and manchets 
of crustiest bread galore. 

Pints of stout, if you please, no puny half-measures, pints of spark- 
ling pale ale, or creaming Scotch, or brownest Burton, moisten these 
sturdy rations. And when the strong men have supped, or rather 
before they have supped, and while they have supped, and indeed 
generally during the evening, there bursts out a strong smell of some- 
thing good to drink ; and presently you perceive that the strong men 



ONE A.M. — EVANS S SUPPER-BOOMS. 



341 




342 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

have ordered potent libations of spirituous liquors, hot whiskey-and- 
water being the favourite one; and are hastily brewing mighty jorums 
of punch and grog, which they undoubtedly quaff; puffing, mean- 
while, cigars of potency and fragrance — -pipes are tabooed — taken 
either from their own cigar-cases, or else recently laid in from the 
inexhaustible stores of the complaisant Herr von Joel. 

" Who will always be retained on this establishment," the pro« 
prietor good-naturedly promises, and more good-naturedly performs. 
" Why," asks the neophyte, "is it necessary for my well-being, or 
the prosperity of this establishment, that the services of Herr von 
Joel should always be retained thereon ? Why this perpetual hypo- 
thecation of Joel ? Can no one else sell me cigars ? What am I to 
Joel, or what is Joel to me ? Confound Joel ! " To which I answer : 
" Rash neophyte, forbear, and listen. In the days when thou wert 
very young and foolish, wore lay-down collars, and had no moustaches, 
save the stickiness produced by much-sucked sweetstuff on the upper 
lips — in the days when thou wert familiar, indeed, with Doctor 
Wackerbarth's seminary for young gentlemen, but not with Evans's 
— Herr von Joel, young and sprightly then, was a famous Mimic. 
In imitating the cries of birds, Herr von Joel was unrivalled, and has 
never been approached. In the old days, when he was famous, and 
did the lark and the linnet so well, he brought crowds of visitors to 
the old supper-rooms, who laughed and wondered at his mimicry, 
supped and drank, and smoked, and paid fat scores. So Joel, in his 
generation, was a benefactor to Evans's. And now, when the thorax 
is rusty, and the larynx no longer supple, the faithful servant rests 
upon " his well-earned laurels " — of tobacco-leaves — among the old 
faces of old friends. " His helmet is a hive for bees " — and Havannah 
cigars, and " his services will always be retained in this establish- 
ment." One w r ould shudder to think of Wellington's old charger, 
Copenhagen, being sent to Cow Cross, to the knackers, instead of 
ending his days peacefully in a paddock at Strathfieldsaye. No one 
likes to hear of Sophie Arnould or Mademoiselle Camargo (the ballet- 
dancer who introduced short petticoats) being brought to indigence in 
their declining years. Guilbert in the hospital, Cainoens starving, 
blind Belisarius begging for an obolus, these are pitiable ; and to 
this day I think the country might have done something for the 
widow of Ramo Samee. We give pensions to the families of those 
who use their swords well, but I should like to know how many can 
swallow them as Ramo did ? 



0XE A.M. ETANS'S SUPPER-ROOMS. 343 

All the while the company have been supping and I have been 
prosing, the " Cave of Harmony" has not belied its name. A bevy 
of fresh-coloured youths, of meagre stature, of curly hair, in broad 
collars and round jackets, such as distinguished you and me, neophyte, 
when we were pupils at Dr. Wackerbarth's, have made themselves 
manifest on the stage, and in admirable time and tune have chanted 
with their silver-bell voices those rare old glees which were written 
by the honest old masters before the Father of Evil had invented 
Signor Guiseppe Verdi. Thersites Theorbo (who is an assiduous fre- 
quenter of the Cave at hours when men of not so transcendent a 
genius are in bed) Thersites Theorbo, down yonder in the cafe ante- 
saloon, glowering over his grog, cannot forbear beating time and 
wagging his august head approvingly when he hears the little boys 
sing. May their pure harmony do the battered old cynic good! 
Honest old glees ! though your composers wore pigtails and laced 
ruffles. And none the worse, either, because we owe some of the 
most beautiful of them to an Irish nobleman. Do you know who that 
nobleman was ? Go ask Mr. Thackeray, who, in an absurd copy of 
verses, written in barbarous Cockney slang, has brought the " unac- 
customed brine " to these eyes many and many a time. He describes 
a stately lady sitting by an open window, beside the " flowing Boyne," 
with a baby on her lap. It is a man child, and not far off is the 
father, 

" . . Most musical of Lords, 

A playing madrigals and glees 

Upon the harpsichords." 

And this child's father was old Lord Mornington, whose son was 
Arthur, Duke of Wellington. 

If you scrutinise the faces of these juvenile choristers somewhat 
narrowly, and happen yourself to be a tolerably regular attendant at 
the abbey church of St. Peter's, Westminster, it is not at all impro- 
bable that you may recognise one or two young gentlemen whom, 
arrayed in snowy surplices, you may have heard trilling forth in shrill 
notes their parts of the service among the gentlemen choristers and 
minor canons of the Abbey. I wonder if it is very wicked for them 
to be found at Evans's thus late. I don't mean at one o'clock in the 
morning, for they mostly disappear about midnight. Perhaps not so 
wicked, for I know there are some people so very religious that they 
only think of religion on Sundays ; and fancy that week-day transactions 
can't have the slightest connection with the Sabbath. However this 



344 TWICE ROUTS D THE CLOCK. 

may be, I must mention it as a curious fact in relation with the moral 
economy of Evans's, that in the old days, when Captain Costigan or 
one of his peers, was about to sing anything approaching to a chanson 
grivoise, the juveniles were invariably marched out of the room by 
a discreet waiter, in order that their young ears might not be con- 
taminated. 

With respect to the remaining harmonic attractions of Evans's, I 
shall be very brief. I believe that on some evenings individuals of 
the Ethiopian way of thinking, and accoutred in the ordinary amount 
of lamp-black, Welsh wig, and shirt-collars, and provided with the 
usual banjo, accordion, tambourine, and bones, are in the habit of 
informing the audience that things in general are assuming an appear- 
ance of " Hoop de dooden do ;" also of lamenting the untimely 
demise of one Ned, an aged blackamoor, who stood towards them in 
an avuncular relation, and of passionately demanding the cause of 
their master effecting the sale of their persons, by auction or other- 
wise, on the day on which they entered into the state of matrimony. 
I am given to understand that a gentleman with an astonishing fal- 
setto voice is a great favourite among the habitues, and that some 
screaming comic songs by popular vocalists are nightly given with 
immense applause ; but I candidly confess that I am not qualified to 
speak with any great degree of certitude with respect to these per- 
formances. I go to Evans's generally very late, and as seldom ven- 
ture close to the proscenium. I am content to bide in the ante-saloon, 
and to muse upon Thersites Theorbo, glowering over his grog. 

This iracund journalist — -to borrow an epithet from Mr. Carlyle — is 
not by any means solitary in his patronage of the marble-tabled, por- 
trait-hung cafe. To tell the honest truth, as, in Paris, if you wish to 
see the actors in vogue, you must go to the Cafe du Vaudeville — if 
the authors, to the Cafe Cardinal or the Cafe du Helder — if the artists, 
to the Cafe des Italiens — if the students, to the Cafe Beige — and if 
the dandies, to the Cafe de Paris ; so in London, if you wish to see 
the wits and the journalist men about town of the day, you must go 
to Evans's about one o'clock in the morning. Then those ineffables 
turn out of the smoking-rooms of their clubs — clique-clubs mostly — 
and meet on this neutral ground to gird at one another. Autres 
temps, autres mceurs. A century since it used to be Wills' s or But- 
ton's, or the Rose; now it is Evans's. I should dearly like to draw 
some pen-and-ink portraits for you of the wits as they sit, and drink, 
and smoke, at one o'clock in the morning ; but I dare not. As for 



ONE A.M. A FIRE. 345 

Thersites Theorbo, he is a shadow. You know what I told you about 
clubs ; and this place also is a prison-house to me. It is true, 
Heaven help me, that I am not affiliated to witcraft myself, that I 
am neither priest nor deacon. Still I have been one of the little boys 
in red cassocks, who swing the censers, and I dare not reveal the 
secrets of the sacristy. But I may just whisper furtively in your ear, 
that Ethelred Guffoon is never seen at Evans's. It makes his head 
ache. Mr. Goodman Twoshoes, also, is but a seldom visitor to the 
Cave of Harmony. He prefers his snug corner-box at the Albion, 
where he can brew his beloved ginger-punch. It is not that the 
wits despise the " Cave." Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, not unfre- 
quently condescends to wither mankind through his spectacles from 
one of the marble tables; and I have seen the whole " Times" 
newspaper — proprietors, editors, special correspondents, and literary 
critics — hob-nobbing together at— Will you hold your tongue, sir ? 
One trifling indiscretion more, and I have done with Evans's. 
64 It is not generally known," as accurate, erudite, and amusing Mr. 
John Timbs would say, that the sly gallantry of Mr. Green, the pro- 
prietor of the Cave of Harmony, caused him, when his new and 
sumptuous music-hall was in course of construction, to move the 
architect to build some cunning loop-holes and points of espial con- 
nected with commodious apartments — in other words, with private 
boxes, somewhat resembling the baignoires in the Parisian theatres, 
whence ladies could see and hear all that was going on without being 
seen or heard. A somewhat similar contrivance exists, it will be 
remembered, in our House of Commons ; I only wish that the fair 
ones who there lie per dues during a late debate, were doomed to hear 
as little trash as meets their ears from the secluded bowers over- 
hanging Evans's. What passport is required to ensure admission 
into these blissful regions I know not ; but I have it on good authority 
that ladies of the " very highest rank and distinction " — to use a 
"Morning Postism" — have on several occasions graced Evans's with 
their presence, and with condescending smiles looked down upon the 
revelries of their lords. 

Tell me, you who are so quick of hearing, what is that noise above 
our heads — it must be in the street beyond — and which dominates the 
revelry as the sound of the cannon did the music of the Duchess of 
Richmond's ball before Quatre Bras. It grows louder and louder, it 
comes nearer and nearer, it swells into a hoarse continually-jarring 

z 



346 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

roar, as I sit smoking at Evans's. The sham blackamoor on the stage 
pauses in his buffoonery, forbears to smite his woolly pate with the 
tambourine ; his colleague's accordion is suspended in the midst of a 
phthisic wheeze, and the abhorred bones quiver, yet unreverberate in 
the nicoto-alcholoicho-charged air. The rattle of knives and forks, 
the buzzing conversation, cease ; a hundred queries as to the cause of 
the noise rise on as many lips; the waiters forget to rattle the change, 
the toper forgets to sip his grog : there is intromission even in the 
inspiration of tobacco fumes : then comes the mighty answer — comes 
at once from all quarters — caught up, echoed and re-echoed, and 
fraught with dread, the momentous word — Fihe ! 

Man, it has been somewhere pertinently observed, is a hunting 
animal. The delight in having something to run after ; whether it 
be a pickpocket, who has just eloped with a watch or a silk handker- 
chief; a dog with a kettle tied to his tail, a hare ? a deer, a woman, 
a fugitive hat, a slaver, a prima donna^ a lord's tuft, an oriental 
traveller, a deformed dwarf — something to chase, something to scour 
and scud after, something to run down, and ultimately devour and 
destroy : such a pursuit enlivens and comforts the heart of man, and 
makes him remember that he has the blood of Nimrod in his veins. 
The schoolboys at Eton have their " paper chases," and course miles 
through the pleasant playing-fields, crossing brooks, and tearing 
through hedges, after a quire of fodscap torn up into shreds. The 
child chases a butterfly ; the adult exhausts himself and his horse in 
racing after a much-stinking fox ; and the octogenarian frets his palsied 
old limbs, and bursts into a feverish snail's gallop, after a seat on the 
Treasury Bench, or a strip of blue velvet embroidered with " honi soit 
qui mat y pense " in gold, and called a garter. There is a wild, en- 
grossing excitement and pleasure in hunting; the fox-hound, the 
otter, the " harmless necessary cat," would tell you so, were their 
speech articulate ; but of all things huntable, chasable, rundownable, 
I doubt if there be one that can equal a Fire. 

" Eire ! fire ! " It matters not how late the hour be, how im- 
portant the avocations of the moment, that magic cry sets all legs, 
save those of the halt and the bed-ridden, in motion — strikes on every 
tympanum. " Eire ! fire ! " as the sound rolls earwards, the gambler 
starts up from the dicing-table, the bibber leaves the wine-pots, the 
lover rises from his mistress's feet, the blushing maiden forgets half 
of that last glowing declaration, the captive runs to his grated win- 
dow, the sluggard sits up on his couch, the sick man turns his head 



ONE A.M. — A TIRE. 347 

on his pillow to whence issues the portentous cry. Hundreds of im- 
pulses are bound up in the uncontrollable desire that prompts us to 
run at once after the " Fire ! " Fear : it may be our own premises 
that are blazing, our own dear ones that are in peril. Hope and 
cupidity : we may be rogues, and there may be rich plunder from a 
fire. . Duty : we may be policemen, firemen, or newspaper reporters. 
Generous emulation, brave self-devotion : there may be lives at stake 
and lives to save. Curiosity : it is as good to see a house burned 
(when it doesn't happen to be your own) as a bear baited or a man 
hanged. All these may prompt us to follow the howl of the fire- 
dogs; but, chiefest of all, is the vague, indefinite, yet omnipotent 
desire to swell a pursuing crowd, to join in a hue and cry, to press 
to the van of the chasers : to hunt something, in fact. 

I never could understand where a London crowd comes from. Be 
the hour ever so late, were the street ever so deserted a moment 
before, a man quarrelling with his wife, or cry of Fire, will be suffi- 
cient to evoke the presence of a compact and curious crowd, growing 
instantaneously thicker and noisier. Whether they start from the 
sewers or the cellar-gratings, or drop from the chimney-pots or the 
roof-copings, is indeterminate; yet they gather somehow, and jostle, 
squeeze, yell, stamp, and tear furiously. No conscription, no muster- 
ing of the posse comitatis, no summoning of ban and arriere ban, no 
" call of the House,'*' no sending forth of the " fiery cross," no beacon 
signalling, no Vehmgericht convening under penalty of the cord and 
dagger, could be half so successful in calling multitudes together as 
the one word — Fihe ! A minute past, I was at Evans's, tranquilly 
conversing with the veteran Herr von Joel, and now I find myself 
racing like mad up St. Martin's Lane, towards St. Giles's. How I 
found my hat and donned it I haven't the slightest idea, and I sin- 
cerely hope that I didn't forget to pay the waiter for my chop, kidney, 
stout, and etceteras. All I know is, that I am running after that 
hoarse cry, and towards that awful Redness in the sky ; that I tread 
upon unnumbered corns ; that I hold cheap as air, innumerable 
punches and thrusts which I receive from my neighbours ; and that 
I will not by any means undertake to make oath that I am not myself 
also vociferating, " Fire ! Fire ! " with the full strength of my lungs. 

I thought so. There goes the " Country Fire Office.*' There it 
goes, dashing, rattling, blazing along — only the very strongest adjec- 
tive, used participle-wise, can give a notion of its bewildering speed — 
there it goes, with its strong, handsome horse?, champing, fuming, 



343 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

setting the pavement on fire with their space-devouring hoofs, and 
seeming to participate in the fire-hunting mania. They need no 
whip ; only the voices of the firemen, clustering on the engine lite 
bees, the loose rattle of the reins on their backs, and the cheers of the 
accompanying crowd. The very engine, burnished and glistening, 
flashing and blushing in its scarlet and gold in the gaslight, seems 
imbued with feeling, and scintillating with excitement — (Oh ! critics 
of fishy blood, oyster temperament, and tortoise impulses, pardon my 
heedless exuberance of epithet) — so gleaming and glittering, and its 
catherine-like wheels revolving, and the moon just tipping the bur- 
nished helmets and hatchets of the fire-men, who will have a ruddy 
glare on those accoutrements shortly, goes screaming through the 
night, the County Fire-engine. The Northern Express blazing over 
Chatmoss at speed is a terrible sight to see : that fiery messenger has 
subdued the wilderness, and made the waste places, whilom the haunts 
of bats and dragons, tremble; but the fast-tearing fire-engine is nobler 
and more Human. It cleaves its way through the sleeping city ; it 
bears the tidings of succour and deliverance. Yon express-train may 
convey but a company of chapmen and pedlars, thirsting to higgle in 
the cheapest so that they may haggle in the dearest market ; but the 
fire-engine is freighted with brave manly hearts, braced — with little 
lust of lucre, God knows ! for their pay is but a pittance — to the noble 
task of saving human life. That they do so save it, almost every night 
throughout the year, save it in the midst of peril to their own, in the 
ever-imminent peril of a sudden, hideous, unrewarded death ? Mr. 
Braidwood and the fire companies know full well. That the best of 
the young British painting men, John Everett Millais, should have 
chosen the every»day, but none the less glorious, heroism of a fireman 
for the theme of a magnificent picture, is good to know ; and the very 
thought of the picture goes far towards making us forgive the painter 
for his asinine " Sir Isumbrasse," or whatever the abortion was called ; 
but it would be better if the knowledge of our firemen's good deserv- 
ings were extended beyond Mr. Braidwood and the fire companies. 
The deeds of those plain men with the leathern helmets and the trusty 
hatchets, have received neither their full meed of praise, nor a tithe 
of their meed of reward. I have yet to hear of the Fireman's Order 
of Valour; I have yet to learn that our bounteous Government, so 
prompt to recognise diplomatic demerit, to reward political worthless- 
ness, and to ennoble military failure, have thought it worth their while 
to bestow even the minutest modicum of a pension on a fireman. To 



OXE A.M. — A TITLE. 



319 




350 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

be sure, these worldly, unwise men, are, for their own interests' sake, 
disastrously and inexcusably modest, unobstrusive, and retiring. There 
is no trumpeter attached ex-cfficio to the fire brigade. Would you 
believe it, that these unambitious men, their glorious labours over, are 
content to retire to the sheds where their engines stand at livery, 
where they eat bread-and-cheese with clasp knives, read cheap news- 
papers, and teach tricks to their dogs ? Their principal recreation is 
to scrub, polish, tickle, and frictionise the brass and wood work of the 
fire-engines to a Dutch pitch of cleanliness, and they are much given, 
I am sorry to say, to the smoking of long clay pipes. This is, in 
itself, sufficient to ruin them in the estimation of such sages and 
public benefactors as ex-Lord Mayor Garden. Let us hope that it is 
not his ex-Lordship's house that is being burned down this November 
morning. 

No — the fire is in the very thickest part of St. Giles's. Unfaithful 
topographers may have told you that the " Holy Land " being swept 
away and Buckeridge Street being pulled down, St. Giles's exists no 
more. Ne'n croyez rien. The place yet lives — hideous, squalid, de- 
crepit — yet full of an unwholesome vitality. Splendid streets have 
been pierced through the heart of this region — streets full of mansions 
four and six storeys high — affluent tradesmen display their splendid 
wares through glistening plate-glass windows. But St. Giles's is 
behind, round about, environing the new erections, sitting like Mor- 
decai in the gate on the threshold of the brick and mortar and stucco 
palaces with which cunning contractors and speculative builders have 
sought to disguise the most infamous district in London. The proof 
of what I have asserted is very easy. You have but to be invited to 
dinner in Gower Street, or to have a morning call to make in Bedford 
Square. Take a walk from young Mr. Barry's bran-new opera-house 
in Bow Street, and walk straight a-head — nearly a measured mile to 
the Square of Bedford. You pass the gigantic carriage factory, which 
I will call by its ancestral name of Houlditeh's — for it always seems to 
be changing proprietors — at the corner of Long Acre. You ascend 
Endell Street, and greet with satisfaction such signs of advancing 
civilisation as baths and wash-houses, and a bran-new dispensary. I 
had forgotten to mention that you might have had a back view of St. 
Martin's Hall. Then you cross the area of High Street, St. Giles's, or 
High Street, Holborn, whichsoever you may elect to call it. Then, 
still straight a-head, you mount Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, a tho- 
roughfare dignified by any number of churches, belonging to any num- 



OXE A.M. — A FIRE. 351 

ber of persuasions. And then you are at your journey's end, and are 
free to call in Bedford Square, to dine in Gower Street, or to go see 
the Nine Yeh [Marbles in the British Museum, comme bon voas semble. 

But throughout this pilgrimage, passing by edifices erected in the 
newest Byzantine, or early English, or Elizabethan, or sham Gothic 
style, you have had St. Giles's always before, behind, and about you. 
From a hundred foul lanes and alleys have debouched, on to the spick- 
and-span-new promenade, unheard-of human horrors. Gibbering 
forms of men and women in filthy rags, with fiery heads of shock hair, 
the roots beginning an inch from the eyebrows, with the eyes them- 
selves bleared and gummy, with gashes filled with yellow fangs for 

h, with rough holes punched in the nasal cartilage for nostrils, 
with sprawling hands and splay feet, tessellated with dirt- — awful de- 
formities, with horrifying malformations of the limbs and running 
sores ostentatiously displayed ; Ghoules and Afrits in a travestie of 
human form, rattling uncouth forms of speech in their vitrified throt- 
tles. These hang about your feet like reptiles, or crawl round you 
like loathsome vermin, and in a demoniac whine beg charity from you. 
One can bear the men ; ferocious and repulsive as they are, a penny 
and a threat will send them cowering and cursing to their noisome 
holes again. One cannot bear the women without a shudder, and a 
feeling of infinite sorrow and humiliation. They are so horrible to look 
upon, so thoroughly unsexed, shameless. Heaven-abandoned and for- 
lorn, with their bare liver-coloured feet beating the devil's tattoo on the 
pavement, their lean shoulders shrugged up to their sallow cheeks, over 
which falls hair either wildly dishevelled or filthily matted, and their 
gaunt hands clutching at the tattered remnant of a shawl, which but 
sorrily veils the lamentable fact that they have no gown — that a ragged 
petticoat and a more ragged undergarment are all they have to cover 
themselves withal. With sternness and determination one can bear 
these sights ; but, heavens and earth ! the little children ! who swarm, 
pullulate — who seem to be evoked from the gutter, and called up from 
the kennel, who clamber about your knees, who lie so thickly in your 
path that you are near stumbling over one of them every moment, 
who, ten times raggeder, dirtier, and more wretched-looking than their 
elders, with their baby faces rendered wolfish by privation, and look- 
ing a hundred years old, rather than not ten times that number of days, 
fight and scream, whimper and fondle, crawl and leap like the phan- 
toms a man sees during the access of delirium tremens. I declare that 
there are babies among these miserable ones — babies with the preter- 



352 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

naturally wise faces of grown up men ; babies who, I doubt little, can 
lie, and steal, and beg, and who, in a year or so, will be able to fight 
and swear, and be sent to jail for six months' hard labour, Plenty 
of the children are big enough to be " whipped and discharged.' ' 
Yes; that is the pleasant tee-totum: " six months'* hard labour," 
" whipped and discharged," the merry prologue to Portland and the 
hulks, the humorous apprenticeship to the penal settlements and the 
gallows. And yet people will tell me that St. Giles's is " done away 
with " — " put down," as the worshipful Sir Peter Laurie would say. 
Glance down any one of the narrow lanes you like after passing 
Broker's Row. See the children coming out of the gin-shops and 
the pawnbrokers'. Ask the policeman whether every court in the 
vicinity be not full of thieves, and worse. Look at the lanes them- 
selves, with the filthy rags flaunting from poles in the windows in 
bitter mockery of being hung out to dry after washing ; with their 
belching doorways, the thresholds littered with wallowing infants, 
and revealing beyond a Dantean perspective of infected backyard and 
cloacan staircase. Peep, as well as you may for the dirt-obscured 
window panes, and see the dens of wretchedness where the people 
whose existence you ignore dwell — the sick and infirm, often the 
dying, sometimes the dead, lying on the bare floor, or, at best, covered 
with some tattered scraps of blanketing or matting; the shivering 
age crouching over fireless grates, and drunken husbands bursting 
through the rotten doors to seize their gaunt wives by the hair, and 
bruise their already swollen faces, because they have pawned what few 
rags remain to purchase gin. But then St. Giles's doesn't exist ! It 
has been done away with ! It is put down ! " Stunning Joe Banks " 
and Bamfylde Moore Carew have been subdued by civilisation and 
the march of intellect ! Of course. 

Notwithstanding all which there is a terrific fire in the very midst 
of St. Giles's to-night ; and that conflagration may do more in its 
generation towards the abolition of the district, than all the astute 
contractors and speculative builders. The fire is at an oilman's shop, 
who likewise manufactures and deals in pickles, and from the nature 
of the combustible commodities in which he trades, you may anticipate 
a rare blaze. Blaze ! say an eruption of Mount Vesuvius rather ; far 
high into the air shoot columns of flame, and hanging thickly over all 
are billows upon billows of crimson smoke, the whole encircled by 
myriads of fiery sparks that fall upon the gaping crowd and make 
them dance and yell with terror and excitement. 



ONE A.M. — A FIRE. 353 

The police have very speedily made a sanitary cordon round about 
the blazing premises, and let none pass save those who have special 
business near the place. The firemen are " welcome guests " within 
the magic cordon, as also the fussy, self-important sergeants and in- 
spectors of police, who often do more harm than good with their 
orders and counter-orders. There are some other gentlemen, too, who 
slip in and out unquestioned and unchallenged. They don't pump at 
the fire-engines, and they don't volunteer to man the fire-escape. But 
they seem to have an undisputed though unrecognised right to be 
here, there, and everywhere, and are received on a footing of humor- 
ous equality by the police, the fire-escape men, the firemen, and the 
very firemen's dogs. They are not official-looking persons by any 
means. They wear no uniforms, they carry no signs of authority, such 
as truncheons, armlets, or the like. They are rather given, on the 
contrary, to a plain and unpretending, not to say u seedy," style of 
attire. Napless hats, surtouts tightly buttoned up to the throat and 
white at the seams, pantaloons of undecided length, unblackened 
bluchers, and umbrellas, seem to be the favourite wear among these 
gentlemen. They are, not to mince the matter, what are termed 
" occasional reporters " to the daily newspapers, and, in le.ss courteous 
parlance, are denominated "penny-a-liners." It is the vocation of 
these gentlemen (worthy souls for the most part — working very hard 
for very little money) to prowl continually about London town, in 
search of fires, fallings in and down of houses, runnings away of 
vicious horses, breakings down of cabs, carriages, and omnibuses ; and, 
in fact, accidents and casualties of every description. But especially 
fires. Fatal accidents are not unnaturally preferred by the occasional 
reporters, because they lead to coroners' inquests, which have of course 
also to be reported ; and, in the case of a fire, a slight loss of life is 
not objected to. It entails " additional particulars," and perhaps an 
inquiry before the coroner, with an examination of witnesses relative 
to the cause of the fire ; nay, who knows but it may end in a trial for 
arson ? There was — and may be now — a gentleman attached to the 
combustible department of the press, who was so well known and 
practised a hand at reporting conflagrations, that he was christened, 
and to some extent popularly known as, the " Fire King." It was face- 
tiously suggested that he was unconsumable, made of asbestos, not to 
be affected by heat, like Signor Buono Cuore at Cremorne Gardens. 
According to the legend current in London newspaper circles, the 
" Fire King " had his abode next door to a fire-engine station in the 



Soi TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

Waterloo Road, and further to guard against the possibility of missing 
one of these interesting, and, to him, remunerative events, he caused 
to be inscribed on the door-jamb, in lieu of the ordinary injunction 
to "ring the top bell," this solitary announcement on a neat brass 
plate, " Fire Bell." So, when a fire was signalled within the beat 
of that portion of the brigade stationed in the Waterloo Road — or, 
indeed, anywhere else if of sufficient magnitude, for the brigade are 
not by any means particular as to distances, and would as lief go 
down the river to Gravesend or up it to Henley if occasion required — 
a stalwart brigadier, his helmet and hatchet all donned, would pull 
lustily at the fire-bell, accompanying the tintinnabulation by stentorian 
shouts of " Wake up, Charley !" Charley, the " Fire King," perhaps 
at that moment serenely dreaming of new Great Fires of London, 
Temples of Diana at Ephesus^ and Minsters at York, ignited by 
Erostatratuses and Jonathan Martins yet unborn, would sing out of 
the window a sonorous " All right ! " hastily dress, descend, jump on 
the ready-harnessed engine, and be conveyed jubilantly, as fast as ever 
the horses could carry him, to the scene of the fire. But two stains 
existed on the "Fire King's" otherwise fair escutcheon. It was 
darkly rumoured that on one occasion — it was a very fat fire at a patent 
candle manufactory — he had offered to bribe the turncock, so tamper- 
ing with the supply of water ; and that on another, it being a remark- 
ably cold winter's night, he expressed a hope that the main might be 
frozen. And yet a more tender-hearted man — " additional particulars," 
and the claim of a wife and large family beiug put out of the question 
— than the Fire King, does not exist. 

Meanwhile the oil and pickle man's house blazes tremendously. 
The houses on either side must go too ; so think the firemen. Fears 
are entertained for the safety of the houses over the way, already 
scorched and blistering, and the adjoining tenements within a circle 
of a hundred yards are sure to be more or less injured by water, for 
the street is wretchedly narrow, and the houses lean-to frightfully. 
One extremity of the thoroughfare has been shored up for years by 
beams, now rotting. The oil and pickle man is heavily insured, so is 
the contractor for army clothing over the way, so is the wholesale boot 
and shoe manufacturer next door. It would be a mercy if the whole 
decayed stack of buildings were swept away by the devouring, yet 
purifying element. Yes, a mercy, surely a mercy. But the miserable 
inhabitants of the crumbling tenements that cling like barnacles to the 
skirts of the great shops and factories, are they insured ? See them 



ONE A.M. A FIFvE. 355 

swarming from their hovels half naked, frenzied with terror and amaze- 
ment, bearing their trembling children in their arms, or lugging their 
lamentable shreds and scraps of household goods and chattels into the 
open. Are they insured ? The fire will send them to the workhouse, 
or, maybe, to the workhouse dead-wall — for they have no legal settle- 
ment there, or they are not casual paupers, or they haven't seen the 
relieving- officer, or they are too early, or too late — there to crouch 
and die. To be sure, they ought never to have been born. They are 
not necessary for the prosperity of the wholesale trade in boots and 
shoes, oil, pickles, and army clothing. Why cumber they the earth ? 

And still the fire leaps up into the cold morning air. The house 
will be gutted out and out, the police now say authoritatively. Hap- 
pily there is no danger to be apprehended now for human life within 
the blazing pile. The oil and pickle chandler does not dwell in his 
warehouse. He has a snug villa at Kighgate, and is very probably 
now contemplating the motley sky from his parlour- windov/, and won- 
dering wherever the fire can be. The only living person who had to 
be rescued was an old housekeeper, who persisted in saying that she 
had lived in the house " seven and thirty year," and wouldn't leave it 
while one stone remained on another ; which was not so very difficult 
a task, seeing that the premises were built throughout of brick. She 
had to be hustled at last, and after much to do, into the fire-escape ; 
but for hours afterwards she led the firemen a terrible life respecting 
the fate of a certain tom-cat, of extraordinary sagacity, called Ginger, 
which she averred to have left sitting on the lid of the water-butt, 
but which very soon afterwards appeared in the flesh, so scorched that 
it smelt like burnt feathers, and clawing convulsively at the collar of 
a police- constable of the F. division. It is, perhaps, scarcely worth 
while to state that in the course of the fire a poor woman is carried 
from one of the adjoining hovels dead. She was close upon her con- 
finement, and the child and she are gone to a more peaceable and 
merciful city, where lives, at least, are assured for ever. 

Towards two o'clock, the columns of flame begin to grow slenderer, 
less continuous, more fitful. The clanking of the fire-engines does not 
decrease, however, in the least, though the firemen joyfully declare 
that the fire is " got under." The surrounding publicans— who, though 
they closed at midnight, have all taken down their shutters with mar- 
vellous alacrity — are doing a roaring trade in beer, which is distributed 
to the volunteers at the pumps in sufficiently liberal quantities, a check 
being kept upon the amount consumed by means of tickets. Where 



356 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

the tickets come from I have no means of judging, but this wonderful 
fire-brigade seem prepared for everything. 

So, feeling very hot and dry, and dazed about the eyes with constant 
contemplation of the flames, I leave St. Giles's and the oil and pickle 
vender's warehouse, which, when daylight comes, will be but a heap 
of charred, steaming ruins, and wander westward, musing over the fires 
I have seen and the fires I have read of. I think of the great fire of 
London in Charles's time — the fire that began at Pudding Lane and 
ended at Pye Corner, and in commemoration of which they built that 
strange monument, with the gilt shaving-brush at the top — 

" . . . . London's column, pointing to the skies, 
Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies." 

I think of the great fire at the Tower of London in 1841, of which I 
was an eye-witness, and which consumed the hideous armouries built 
by William III. and their priceless contents. I think upon the great 
scuffle and scramble to rescue the crown and regalia from the 
threatened Jewel House, such a scuffle and scramble as had not taken 
place since Colonel Blood's impudent attempt to steal those precious 
things. Then my mind reverts to the monster conflagration by which 
the winter palace at St. Petersburg was destroyed in 1839; of the 
strange discovery then made, that dozens of families lived on the roof 
of the palace — lived, and roosted, and died, and kept fowls and goats 
there, of whose existence the court and the imperial household had 
not the remotest idea ; of the sentinel who died at his post, notwith- 
standing the imperial command to leave it, because he had not been 
relieved by his corporal ; and of the Czar himself watching with com- 
pressed lips the destruction of his magnificent palace, and vainly 
entreating his officers not to risk their lives in endeavouring to save 
the furniture. One zealous aide-de-camp could not be dissuaded from 
the attempt to reach a magnificent pier-glass, framed in gold and 
malachite, from a wall, whereupon his Imperial Majesty, seeing that 
injunction, entreaty, menace were all in vain, hurled, with the full 
force of his gigantic arm, his opera-glass at the sheet of crystal, which 
was shivered to atoms by the blow. Not an uncharacteristic trait of 
Nicholas Romanoff. 



TWO A.M. A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 357- 



TWO O'CLOCK A.M.— A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE 
OF COMMONS, AND THE TURNSTILE OF WATERLOO 
BRIDGE. 

I neyee could understand politics (which difficulty of comprehension 
of a repulsive topic I share, I am delighted to know, with the whole 
charming female sex, for a woman who is a politician is to me no 
woman at all). I never could be consistent in public matters. If 
my remembrance serve me correctly, I think I began life as a flaming 
Conservative. I am now as flaming a Radical; but I admit that I am 
most deplorably deficient in consistency. I find myself, while strain- 
ing every nerve to defend the cause, to advocate the rights, to de- 
nounce the oppressors of that English people of whom I am one, 
frequently halting on ground where Eglintoun Beaverup, the Con- 
servative par excellence, and I can shake hands ; I find myself 
acknowledging that "blood is thicker than water," and that gentle 
birth will hold its own in the midst of sarcasms against the tenth 
transmitters of foolish faces. I find myself actuated now (as ever in 
that I have been consistent) by the same dislike and contempt for the 
cruel, capricious, ruffian, unteachable Mob — the base decamisado ca- 
naille, who are not the working classes, or the lower classes, or any 
other class, but the Father of confusion and anarchy's — the scurvy 
mob who pelt a Castlereagh to-day and tear a John de Witt in pieces 
to-morrow ; who slaughtered Rienzi, and yelped for joy when Madame 
Roland went to the guillotine ; who cried for "justice" upon Charles 
Stuart, and danced round the Tyburn tree from which dangled the 
rotting corpse of Cromwell ; who would trample on Henry Brougham 
or John Russell at the present writing, and rend their vitals, if their 
mobbish majesty were crossed in one of its wild-baboon whims. 

With this candid confession of my political shortcomings (I mean 
to stand some day for the borough of Weathercock), and having thus, 
I hope, disarmed criticism, I shall now venture into the (to me) 
perilous region of politics. It is Two o' Clock in the morning ; we 
will even be present in the spirit at a late debate in the " House." 

Which august assembly has already been designated by some 
irreverent wag as a " large house which keeps bad hours." In truth, 



358 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 

one needs to be very intimately acquainted, not only with the frame- 
work, but with the minuter organisation of English society and insti- 
tutions — (how sick I am, and you must be, of those eternally-recur- 
ring words "institutions" and " society !") — to understand the causes 
of the immoderately late hours kept sometimes by the Lords, but with 
much greater frequency by the Commons' House of Parliament. At 
the first blush, there seems no earthly reason why the legislative 
business of the nation should not be got over during the day, or, at 
the outside, before the night were spent. The French Deputies, 
Conventionalists, or Representatives in the National Assembly, in 
their stormiest and most prolonged debates, seldom heard the chimes 
at midnight ; and, ardent parliamentarians as are the Americans, it 
is only towards the immediate close of the session that Congress keeps 
for two or three days and nights a sort of Saturnalia of untimely 
sittings. If report speaks true, the members of the United States 
Legislature are only enabled to bear these unwonted vigils by in- 
cessant recurrence to powerful stimulants. " Ginslings," " Fiscal 
Agents," " Stone Fences," "Bullocks' Milk," and the innumerable 
tribe of " Cocktails," are at a premium during these abnormally pro- 
tracted debates ; the benches of the House and the desks of the 
members stand in imminent danger of being whittled away during 
the excitement of discussion ; the amount of tobacco masticated is 
sufficient to ruin the digestive powers of the nation ; the spittoons 
overflow, aucl the fretfulness and irritation not unnaturally engendered 
by nervous excitement, occasionally finds relief in cowhiding in the 
committee-rooms, gouging in the lobbies, and " stand up and drag 
out" fights on the august floor itself, occupied by the conscript fathers 
of the republic. Thus I have been informed; but it may be that 
report tells a fib, after all. 

When we arrive, however, at a just understanding and apprecia- 
tion of the mechanism of this wondrous British constitutional watch, 
jewelled in ever so many holes as it is, with its levers, and escape- 
ments, and unnumbered compensation balauces, the lateness of our 
legislative hours will not be by far so much of a mystery to us. We 
are altogether a sitting-up late people. The continental theatres are 
all closed by eleven. We dismiss our audiences sometimes at mid- 
night, oftener at half-past, or a quarter to one in the morning. Our 
fashionable balls commence when those of other nations are termi- 
nating. We may not dine so late, but then we sup heavily, hours 
afterwards. Night life in London does not condescend to commence 



TWO A.M. — A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 359 

till the " small hours ;" yet, in dissipated Paris, you may count the 
cafes and supper-rooms on your fingers whose portals are open at one 
o'clock in the morning. The "Journal des Debats" goes to press at 
four in the afternoon ; eight hours later, there is yet often a leader to 
be written for the forthcoming number of the "Times." The only 
capital that can equal London in the faculty of " keeping it up" to 
any number of hours, is St. Petersburg. There the antipathy which 
the Russians entertain for going to bed is solely surpassed by their 
aversion to getting up. They turn night into day ; but the sturdy, 
strong-willed, perverse English work or dissipate nearly u twice round 
the clock." They make the little children go to bed ; yet the am- 
bition even of those younglings is to "sit up late" like the grown 
people. 

A French senator gets a thousand pounds a year for wearing a blue 
livery coat with a stand-up collar, the whole handsomely embroidered 
in gold ; kerseymere small clothes, and silk stockings, He drives 
down to the Luxembourg in his brougham, about three in the after- 
noon, dozes for a couple of hours on a well-stuffed bench, goes home 
to dine, drink coffee, play tric-trac, read the " Gazette de France," or 
receive a select circle of pensioned fogies like himself. He wakes up 
some fine morning to find himself complimented in the " Moniteur," 
and the gratified recipient of the grand cross of the Legion of Honour. 
A member of the French Corps Legislatif 'receives his wages in a com- 
parative ratio, and pursues an analogous cycle of " duties." But look 
at an English member of Parliament. He receives nothing a year, 
and in many cases has little more than that problematical income, 
sometimes humorously characterised as " midshipman's half-pay," to 
live upon. If he be rich, so much the better ; but wealth will not 
take away a tittle from his hard work. In the early morning, over 
his tea and toast, he has an ocean of correspondence, often frivolous, 
always wearisome, to wade through. Then he has his blue-books to 
dive into, his authorities to consult, his statistics to cram, his speeches 
to " coach," his grievances to hunt up, his exordia to study, his pero- 
rations to practise. Comes the hour of morning calls when he must 
be at home, and give audience to the great army of Askers and the 
legionary tribe of bores, men who will take no denial, importunate 
clients, who want berths in the Post-office for themselves, or rever- 
sions of tide-waiterships for their cousins' cousins. Happily for the 
member of Parliament, Air. Rowland Hill's penny-postage system has 
abolished the frank-hunting torture, which brought many M.P.'s to 



360 TWICE SOUND THE CLOCK. 

death's door, and made more bitterly regret that they had ever been 
taught to write their own names. And woe be to the legislator if he 
receive not his visitors with courtesy ! They probably are con- 
stituents, and a curt answer will frequently send them away charged 
with the deadliest schemes against that member's vote and interest at 
the ensuing general election. As a diversion during the morning 
calls, the M.P. has to receive some dozens of applications for orders 
of admission to the Strangers' Gallery of the House, he having always 
a couple at his disposal. After this, he has, perhaps, to wait upon 
the Prime Minister, in Downing Street, at the head of a deputation 
respecting the disputed right in a cess-pool ; or he may be the chair- 
man of some parliamentary committee, sitting, de die in diem, to in- 
quire into the hideous turpitude of a contractor who has sewn so 
many pairs of soldiers' boots without cobblers' wax. Then, he has 
to take a cab to attend the great public meeting for the Evangelisa- 
tion of Chinese beggars, held at the Mansion House. He is due 
about this time in the board-room of the public company of which 
he is a director ; and at the special committee of the Benevolent 
Institution in which he takes so much interest. A pretty hard 
day's work this, you will acknowledge. Add that the English member 
of Parliament has to be, over and above all this, a man of business or 
pleasure : with a wife and family very often, with a turn for litera- 
ture, or art, or science, or natural history. He is a merchant or 
banker, and must drudge in his counting-house, like the meanest of 
his clerks, or gabble on 'Change with the nimblest-tongued bill- 
broker. He is a great counsel : he cannot plead the cause of " Strad- 
lings versus Styles/' by deputy, or allow his junior to sum up in the 
great will case. He is a celebrity of the fashionable world : he must 
pay his morning visits, ride in the Park, show himself at the " Corner," 
lounge through his clubs, drop in at the opera at night ; and, after all 
this, or rather in the midst of all this, and pervading it like a nightmare, 
there is the real business of his life — the " House." He possesses 
some six hundred other colleagues, who are to the full as busily occu- 
pied as he is during the day, yet manage, somehow, to find themselves 
behind the Speaker's chair, or at the gangway, at five o'clock in the 
afternoon. He had better not be unpunctual or remiss in his attend- 
ance. Those constituents of his, at Shrimpington-super-Mare, will 
call him to a strict account of his stewardship at the end of the 
session, and it may go hard with him at the Mechanics' Institution 
or the Farmers' Ordinary. Under all these circumstances, do you 



TWO A.M. — A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 361 

think it so very extraordinary that there should be occasionally a late 
debate in the House of Commons ? 

You will remark that I have preserved, throughout, a decorous 
reticence with regard to the House of Lords. Goodness forfend that 
I should have to judge their Lordships by the same business-like 
work-a-day standard which I have presumed to apply to the Lower 
House. Their Lordships meet early and separate early, as becometh 
their degree; yet even the Lords have their field-days, and their 
occasions when they sit up late o' nights. Then the right reverend 
bishops come down, booted and spurred, to vote against the heathen ; 
and paralytic old peers are borne to the House in litters, there to 
wheeze forth, in tremulous accents, their unalterable attachment to 
Church and State, so dangerously menaced in "another place," and 
from their most noble pockets they pull forth " proxies," signed by 
other peers more paralytic than themselves. But these field-days of 
the Lords are few and far between, and the otium cum dignitate is the 
easy, comfortable rule with their Lordships. It is but doing them 
justice to say, however, that many peers have been members of the 
Lower House in their time, and have sat up as late, and battled in 
debate as fiercely, as any middle-aged member of her Majesty's Oppo- 
sition. Nor are they all idle, parliamentarily, in the day time. There 
are some noblemen — legal peers mostly — who disdain to rest upon 
their laurels, and are content to spend the long forenoons in listening 
to dreary disquisitions about the wrongs of Parsee traders, and the 
visionary pedigrees of claimants to dormant peerages. The Lords' 
committee hear appeals, and it is a wondrous sight to see those old 
boys snoozing and twiddling their thumbs on the crimson benches of 
their golden chamber. They seem not to listen to the elaborate 
word -entanglements of the bewigged pleaders; yet they make remarks 
full of sense and pregnant with acumen. You are a young man or 
woman, dear reader of this, I hope. You have not much time to 
lose. Go straight down to Palace Yard, pass through Westminster 
Hall, and up the stone stairs, by the giant brazen candelabra and 
the great stained-glass window. So on through the Gothic ves- 
tibules a nd corridors — never mind the frescoes of Messrs. Dyce and 
Company, they are not worth looking at just now. Hie you 
quickly to a door-way half-screened by crimson drapery, and edge 
your way into the House of Lords. An you take off your hat and 
hold your tongue, you may stare about you as much as ever you 
please, and hear your fill of the edifying, if not amusing, appeals. 

A A 



362 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

You may wonder at the Lord Chancellor's wrinkles and at his ruffles ; 
you may listen to Floorem, Attorney- General, and Botherem, Q.C., 
till your eyes begin to wink, and your head to nod, and your whole 
mental framework to grow desperately weary ; but you must not go 
entirely to sleep. Somnolence may entail a fall on the floor of the 
House, which would cause a noise, and would never do ; so, unless 
you are gifted, like a horse, with the power of going to sleep standing, 
I would counsel you to take a cup of strong green tea before you 
enter the House, and so string your nerves up to wakefulness. For 
diversion, turn away your eyes from the verbose barristers in their 
horse-hair, silk, and bombazine, and look at their Lordships. There 
are not often more than half-a-dozen of them present- — seldom so many 
as that. You shall scarcely fail, however, to miss that noble senator — • 
a capital working man of business he is too — who is possessed by the 
curious idiosyncrasy of dressing in the exact similitude of his own 
butler : blue coat and brass buttons, yellow waistcoat, pepper-and-salt 
pantaloons — not trousers, mind — and low shoes. I think, even, that 
his Lordship's head is powdered. You may object that there is no 
reason why a gentleman of the old school, wedded to traditions and 
reminiscences of h hon vieux temps, should not wear such a costume as 
this, and yet look every inch a nobleman. Nor is there, indeed ; but 
glance for a moment at Lord Aspendale, and you will confess that, 
from hair-powder to shoe-string, there is a permeating flavour of the 
side-board and the still-room. "Whether his Lordship likes it, or 
whether his Lordship can't help it, it matters little ; but the fact is 
there, plain and obvious. 

Standing in the narrow Gothic railed-off space reserved for the 
public — the throne at the opposite extremity of the House — you may 
see on one of the benches to the right, almost every forenoon — > 
Saturday and Sunday excepted — during the session, a very old man 
with a white head, and attired in a simple frock and trousers of shep- 
herd's plaid. It is a leonine head, and the white locks are bushy and 
profuse. So, too, the eyebrows, penthouses to eyes somewhat weak 
now, but that can flash fire yet upon occasions, The face is ploughed 
with wrinkles, as well it may be, for the old man will never see four- 
score years again, and of these, threescore, at the very least, have 
been spent in study and the hardest labour, mental and physical. 
The nose is a marvel — protuberant, rugose, aggressive, inquiring, and 
defiant: unlovely, but intellectual. There is a trumpet mouth, a 
belligerent mouth, projecting and self- asserting ; largish ears, and on 



TWO A.M. — A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 363 

chin or cheeks no vestige of hair. Not a beautiful man this on any 
theory of beauty, Hogarthesque, Ruskinesque, Winckelmanesque, or 
otherwise. Rather a shaggy, gnarled, battered, weatherbeaterj, ugly, 
faithful, Scotch-colley type. Not a soft, imploring, yielding face. 
Rather a tearing, mocking, pugnacious, cast of countenance. The 
mouth is fashioned to the saying of harsh, hard, impertinent things : 
not cruel, but downright; but never to whisper compliments, or 
simper out platitudes. A nose, too, that can snuff the battle afar off, 
and with dilated nostrils breathe forth a glory that is sometimes ter- 
rible ; but not a nose for a pouncet-box, or a Covent Garden bouquet, 
or ziftacon of Frangipani. Would not care much for truffles either, 
I think, or the delicate aroma of sparkling Moselle, Would prefer 
onions or strongly-infused malt and hops : something honest and 
unsophisticated. Watch this old man narrowly, young visitor to the 
Lords. Scan his furrowed visage. Mark his odd angular ways and 
gestures passing uncouth. Now he crouches, very doglike, on his 
crimson bench : clasps one shepherd's plaid leg in both his hands. 
Botherem, Q.C., is talking nonsense, I think. Now the legs are 
crossed, and the hands thrown behind the head; now he digs his 
elbows into the little Gothic writing-table before him, and buries the 
hands in that puissant white hair of his. The quiddities of Floorem 9 
Q.C., are beyond human patience. Then with a wrench, a wriggle, a 
shake, a half turn and half start up — still very doglike, but of the 
Newfoundland rather, now, he asks a lawyer or a witness a question. 
Question very sharp and to the point, not often complimentary by- 
times, and couched in that which is neither broad Scotch nor Nor- 
thumbrian burr, but a rebellious mixture of the two. Mark him well, 
eye him closely : you have not much time to lose. Alas ! the giant 
is very old ; though with frame yet unenfeebled, with intellect yet 
gloriously unclouded. But the sands are running, ever running. 
Watch him, mark him, eye him, score him on your mind tablets : 
then home ; and in after years it may be your lot to tell your children, 
that once at least you have seen with your own eyes the famous Lord 
of Vaux ; once listened to the voice that has shaken thrones and 
made tyrants tremble, that has been a herald of deliverance to mil- 
lions pining in slavery and captivity ; a voice that has given utter- 
ance, in man's most eloquent words, to the noblest, wisest thoughts 
lent to this Man of Men by Heaven ; a voice that has been trumpet- 
sounding these sixty years past in defence of Truth, and Right, and 
Justice — in advocacy of the claims of learning and industry, and of 



364 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

the liberties of the great English people, from whose ranks he rose ; 
a voice that should be entitled to a hearing in a Walhalla of wise 
heroes, after Francis of Verulam and Isaac of Grantham ; the voice of 
one who is worthily a lord, but who will be yet better remembered, 
and to all time — remembered enthusiastically and affectionately — as 
the champion of all good and wise and beautiful Human Things — 
Harry Brougham. 

But I must not forget, as I am sorely tempted to do in Westminster 
Hall, that it is two o'clock in the morning. This is the last night 
— the honourable House are positively determined to divide to-night, 
even if the Ministry go out — of the adjourned debate on the Gulliver 
Indemnity Bill. The honourable House have been speechifying at a 
tremendous rate for the last fortnight on the vexed question as to 
whether Samuel Gulliver, master mariner, is or is not to have an 
indemnity. Lord Viscount Palmerston, head of the government, says 
he shall. The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, ex- Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, and head of the Opposition, says he sha'n't. Honourable 
members in formidable numbers range themselves on either side. 
Night after night the House has been ringing with eulogies and 
denunciations of Gulliver and his indemnity. The country is in a 
ferment, the press in arms, on the Titanic topic. A monster meeting 
at Manchester has pledged itself, amid deafening cheers in the Lan- 
cashire dialect and rounds of " Kentish fire," to support the indemni- 
fication of Gulliver by every legal and constitutional means. The 
" Times" newspaper, on its part, declares the indemnity an impudent 
swindle, and plainly announces that if Gulliver be indemnified, Great 
Britain must be content to remain henceforth and for ever a second- 
rate Power. The funds are going up and down like a see-saw, all 
with reference to Gulliver. More bets are made in the clubs, and 
sporting localities in re Gulliver than on the coming Derby, or that 
other vexed question whether Bludgin Yahoo, who murdered the old 
lady with the crowbar (they say he is beautifully penitent in New- 
gate, and that the sheriffs cry to see him eat his daily beefsteak) will 
be hanged or not. The Emperor of Brobdignag is vitally interested 
in Gulliver, and there were two attaches from the Lilliputian embassy 
in the Speaker's gallery the night before last. Never mind who Gul- 
liver was, or what was the nature of the losses for which he sought 
to be indemnified. It matters as little now as whether Bolgrad was 
a hamlet or a town ; and even while the conflict was raging, I very 
much question whether a hundred members of the House of Commons 



TWO A.M. A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OE COMMONS. 365 

knew anything about Gulliver personally, or cared two pins about 
him or his indemnity. In some respects politics are like fox-hunting, 
You want a fast-running, doubling, artful question — the more power- 
ful in odour the better — to start with ; but once run do wn the fox, 
and the question goes for nothing. Sometimes Reynard is scarce ; 
but even then a red herring will serve at a pinch to bark at and run 
after. 

We are in a spacious chamber, not very vast, not very lofty — for 
there is a false roof of ground glass, for acoustic reasons — and not 
very handsome. A sufficiency of oaken panelling, and windows veiled 
with velvet curtains, brilliant but cunningly tempered light — the ab- 
solute lamps invisible. Altogether a comfortable, well-to-do-place — 
say something like an enlarged edition of the coffee-room of a ter- 
minus hotel, as they are building terminus hotels now-a-days, or the 
newspaper-room of a club fitted up for a general meeting of the 
members. A tinge of Gothicism pervades the decorations, here and 
there tending to the Elizabethan, but altogether leaning more to the 
" convenient" style of ornament. Everything that skill and ingenuity 
(duly patented) can devise for the promotion of light, warmth, general 
comfort, &c, are here. Enthroned on high, slender galleries above 
him, is the Speaker, " Jove in his chair, of the skies lord mayor," 
is a sufficiently tremendous Pagan image. He must find it a some- 
what hard task to keep order on Olympus' top occasionally. Vulcan 
will be wrangling with Apollo and eyeing Mars askant : Venus will be 
having high words with Juno, and Minerva boring the celestial com- 
pany generally with her strongmindedness ; to say nothing of Bacchus, 
in the plenitude of fermented grape-juice, volunteering a stave when 
nobody wants one ; Mercury, labouring under his eternal disability to 
keep his hands out of the other gods' and goddesses' pockets ; and the 
arch mischief maker, Cupid, wantoning about on his flyflapper wings, 
and setting everybody by the ears. But Jupiter-Speaker has a thrice 
more difficult task ! Fancy having to preserve discipline among six 
hundred and a half gentlemen — young, old, and middle-aged gentles, 
all fond of the sound of their own voices ; many of whom have dined 
copiously, to the making of them noisy ; some who have not dined at 
all, to the making of them fretful and peevish, not to say quarrelsome. 
Poor Mr. Speaker ! how weary he must be of the honourable House 
and of its honourable members in general, and of the Gulliver's In- 
demnity Bill in particular ! Yet there he sits, the image of urbanity 
and equanimity, graceful, composed, dignified, though taciturn; his 



366 TWICE HOTTED THE CLOCK. 

wig unmoved, his bands and ruffles uncruinpled. How devoutly he 
must wish that the bill were " in committee," when the mace might 
lie under the table, and he himself " leave the chair !" But, alas ! the 
atrocious measure has not yet been read a second time. The country 
need be liberal and the House courteous to the Speaker. Surely, if 
any man deserves a handsome salary, free quarters, and a peerage on 
retirement, it is that Eight Honourable Gentleman. To have to listen, 
night after night, to drowthy verbosities, phantasm statements, night- 
mare gibberings of incoherent statistics, inextricable word-chaoses of 
statements and counter-statements, sham declarations of sham patriot- 
ism bellowed forth with sham energy ; to have to hear these tales, full 
of sound and fury, told by honourable idiots full of unutterable "bun- 
kum" (an Americanism I feel constrained to use, as signifying nothing- 
ness, ineffably inept and irremediably pin-perforated windbaggery, 
and sublimated cucumber sunbeams hopelessly eclipsed into Dis) — 
these must be trials so sore that they need the highest of wages, the 
best of living, to be endured even. To induce a man to keep a turn- 
pike or a lighthouse, to work in a gunpowder mill, or to accept the 
governorship of Cape Coast Castle, you must offer heavy reward. Of 
old, in France, glass-blowing was considered to be a trade so danger- 
ous, and requiring so much abnegation of self, that its professors were 
not ranked with the meaner sort of mechanics. Your glass-blower 
was entitled to wear a sword, a privilege extended since, I believe, to 
printers : (it is lucky they do not exercise it now, or I should be run 
through and through a dozen times a day by compositors infuriate at 
illegible spider manuscript.) He could blow glass without tarnishing 
his 'scutcheon, and was called " Gentilhomme Verrier." Touching 
the Speakership, I think that the mere obligation of hearing men who 
hate each other, bandying the epithet of " honourable friend" so 
many hundred times in a night, is in itself worth two thousand 
a year. 

The House has commenced. The peers' gallery, ambassadors' 
seats, strangers', Speaker's gallery, all full of attentive listeners. 
" Distinguished foreigners " are present. The Emperor of Brob- 
dignag's ex-Minister for Foreign Affairs has come down from the 
Travellers', where he has been playing whist with the Hospodar 
of Wallachia's Charge cC Affaires, and lurks in ambush behind the 
Speaker. The sparkling eyes of ladies, seeing but unseen, look 
down, as at Evans's, upon the hail. The members' benches — oaken 
covered with green leather, carved ends — are full. The members' 



TYv r O A.M. — A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 367 

gallery (stretching along both sides of the House) is, to tell the truth, 
not full, but it is possibly occupied by honourable members who have 
retired thither to — listen to the debate, of course. Oddly enough, 
they find that the assumption of a horizontal position is the very 
best for hearing that which is going on below; or, perhaps, they 
only imitate in this Fortunio's gifted servant. To turn the face 
to the wall, also, seems a favourite method of stimulating the auditory 
nerve; and some honourable gentlemen are so engrossed in the 
exciting debate proceeding in the House, that, at two o'clock in 
the morning, they sometimes give vent to their overworked-up 
feelings in a deep stertorous nasal sound resembling a snore. 

Up in the reporters' gallery there, the gentlemen who submit to 
"work on an intellectual treadmill for three hundred pounds a year," 
are having hard times of it. The " turns" of stenography are getting 
shorter and shorter ; but, alas ! they have been terribly frequent 
during the debate. How unmerciful have been the maledictions be- 
stowed on Gulliver and his indemnity since nve p.m. when the Speaker 
was at prayers ! Gulliver would be a bold man to venture into the 
cushion-benched chamber behind the gallery where the gentlemen of 
the Press retire to transcribe their notes. O'Dobbin of the Qi Flail" 
has been dying to hear Tamberlik in " Oteilo" these six weeks past, 
His chief gave him a stall this morning. Gulliver sits in it like a 
ghoule on a grave. Dollfus, of Garden Court, Temple, was invited to 
Jack Tritail, the newly-made barrister's, "call" carouse in Lincoln's 
Inn Hall. Gulliver is sitting at the hospitable board, gulping down 
the claret like Garagantua. Little Spitters, who was always a ladies' 
man, was to have been a "welcome guest" at a neat villa not far 
from Hammersmith Broadway. The fiend Gulliver is at this moment 
being called a " droll creature," and is flirting with the eldest Miss 
Cockletop. 

The great chief of the Opposition has spoken. Gloomy, saturnine, 
isolated, yet triumphant, sits the eloquent and sarcastic Caucasian. 
Those once brilliant black corkscrew ringlets are growing slightly 
gray and wiry now, the chin tuft has disappeared, and time and 
thought have drawn deep lines in the sallow visage of Benjamin 
Disraeli, ruler of the Opposition. His attire, too, is sober compared 
with the myriad-hued garb, the flashing jewellery, and vests of many 
colours, with which Benjamin was wont to dazzle our eyes in the days 
before he slew Robert Peel, and hired himself to the Protectionists — 
all in a parliamentary sense. People say, when he wrote " Venetia" 



TWICE BOUND THE CLOCK. 




TWO A.M. — A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 369 

and the " Revolutionary Epic," he used to wear laced ruffles at his 
wrists and black velvet inexpressibles. He is wiser now. He has 
turned the half century, and only wears a vest of many colours when 
he dons his gold robe as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has worn 
it once, and would very much like to wear it again. He has made a 
very long, telling, brilliant speech, in which he has said a multitude of 
damaging things against Gulliver, his indemnity, and especially against 
the noble Viscount at the head of the Government. He has never 
been abusive, insulting, coarse, virulent — oh, never ! he has not once 
lost his temper. He has treated the noble Viscount with marked 
courtesy, and has called him his right honourable and noble friend 
scores of times ; yet, hearing him, it has been impossible to avoid the 
impression that if any man was ever actuated by the conviction that 
his right honourable and noble friend was an impostor and a humbug, 
with a considerable dash of the traitor ; and that — without hinting 
anything in the slightest degree libellous — his right honourable and 
noble friend had been once or twice convicted of larceny, and had failed 
in clearing himself from the suspicion of having murdered his grand- 
mother, that man was Benjamin Disraeli, M.P. for the county of 
Bucks. He did not begin brilliantly. He was not in the slightest 
degree like Cicero or Demosthenes, Burke or Grattan, or like thee, 
my Eglintoun Beaverup, when thou descantest upon the " glorious 
old cocks," the " real tap, sir," of antiquity. He was, on the contrary, 
slow, laboured, downcast, and somewhat ponderous ; nor even at the 
conclusion of his magnificent harangue, did he throw his arms about, 
smite his breast, stamp his foot, or cast his eyes up to heaven — and 
the ceiling. The days of weeping and gesticulation, of crumpling up 
sheets of paper, cracking slave-whips, flinging down daggers, and 
smashing the works of watches, seem to have departed from the House 
of Commons. Yet the eminent Caucasian contrived to create a very 
appreciable sensation, and certainly shot those barbed arrows of his — 
arrows tipped with judicious sarcasm and polite malevolence — with 
amazing dexterity and with murderous success. He has made his 
noble friend wince more than once, I will be bound. But you cannot 
see the workings of that stateman's face, for (save while addressing 
the House) he wears his hat ; and the light coming from above causes 
the friendly brim to cast the vice-comital countenance into shadow. 

A noticeable man this Hebrew Caucasian, Benjamin Disraeli, with 
his byegone literary nonsenses, and black- velvet-trousered frivolities. 
Not at all an English Man, trustworthy, loveable, nor indeed admir- 



370 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

able, according to our sturdy English prejudices. Such statesmen as 
Shaftesbury, Ximenes, De Eetz, any minister with a penchant for 
"dark and crooked ways," would have delighted in him; but to 
upright, albeit bigoted, William Pitt, he would have had anything but 
a sweet savour. Even Tory Castlereagh and Tory Sidmouth would 
but ill have relished this slippery, spangled, spotted, insincere Will-o'- 
the-wisp patriot. I should like very much to have known what manner 
of opinion the late Duke of Wellington entertained of Benjamin 
Disraeli. It is, of course, but matter of speculation ; but I can't help 
thinking, too, that if Arthur Wellesley had had Benjamin in the 
Peninsula, he would have hanged him to a certainty. 

Hush ! pray hush ! Silence, ye cackling juniors on the back 
benches ; wake up, ye sluggards — only they don't wake up — the noble 
Viscount at the head of the Government is speaking. He begins 
confidently enough, but somewhat wearily, as though he were 
thoroughly tired of the whole business. But he warms gradually, and 
he, in his turn, too, can say damaging things about his right honour- 
able friend, head of the Opposition. But he never says anything 
spiteful — is at most petulant (loses his temper altogether sometimes, 
they say), and flings about some bon mots that, were they published in 
this week's " Punch," would cause a well-grounded complaint of the 
growing dulness of that periodical. He speaks long, and to the pur- 
pose, and you can see at once in what stead have stood to him his 
long official career, his immense parliamentary experience. Recollect 
that John Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, has sat in Parliament 
for half a century, was Secretary-at-War while Wellington was yet 
wrestling with Napoleon's marshals in Spain, was one of the authors 
of the "New Whig Guide," has formed part of scores of adminis- 
trations ; and — one of the hardest- worked men of his time — has yet 
found leasure to be a beau and lion of fashion in Grosvenorian circles, 
and to be called " Cupid" — Grosvenorian circles rather chap-fallen, 
crow's-footed, rheumy about the eyes by this time, rather fallen into 
the sere and yellow leaf, now hessians and short waists have gone out, 
hoops and pegtops come in. Drollest of all, to think that this smug 
elderly gentleman, voluble in spite of tongue-clogging seventy, and 
jaunty in spite of evident gout, but quite a decorous, father-of-family, 
select vestryman-looking ancient, should be the " terrible P aimer ston" 
the firebrand of the Continent, the bugbear of foreign oligarchs, the 
grim " Caballero Balmerson" naming whom Spanish contrabandistas 
cross themselves, the abhorred " Palmerstoni" whom papal gensd'arme 



TWO A.M. — A LATE DEBATE lis THE HOUSE OP C03IXONS. 371 

imagine to be an emerited brigand who has long defied the pontifical 
authority from an inaccessible fastness in the Apennines. I need not 
tell you anything more about his speech. You will find it all in 
Hansard ; and the newspapers of the day gave an accurate summary 
of the cheers, the counter-cheers, the ironical cheers, the " Hear, 
hears/' and the " Oh, ohV which accompanied the harangue, toge- 
ther with the "loud and continuous cheering*' (from his own side of 
the House) which greeted its conclusion. 

The longest lane, however, must have a turning ; and this des- 
perately long drawn-out parliamentary avenue has its turning at last. 
There have been frenzied shrieks of " Divide — divide ! " numerous 
bores who have essayed to speak have been summarily shut up and 
coughed down ; and at length strangers are ordered to withdraw, and 
the division bell rings. 

" On our re-admission," we quote from the "Times" newspaper 
of 185 — , the results of the division were announced as follows : — 
For the second reading: of the bill . . 284 
Against it 307 



Majority against the Government . . 23 

The bill was consequently lost. 

Next day the Government presided over by the noble Viscount who 
wears his hat, goes out of office — the "Times" giving it a graceful 
kick at parting, and hinting that it was never anything more than a 
disreputable, shameless, abandoned clique, whose nepotism had grown 
intolerable in the nostrils of the nation. The Right Honourable Cau- 
casian, who doesn't wear his hat, is sent for by a certain friend of his — 
a noble Earl, who is generally considered a first-rate hand at making 
up a book for the Derby. He in his turn is sent for by his Most 
Gracious Sovereign ; and, for the next three or four days, there is 
nothing but running about and getting upstairs between Buckingham 
Palace, St. James's Square, and Grosvenor Gate ; and at the end of 
that time, the right honourable Caucasian finds himself snugly en- 
sconced in Downing Street, with full liberty to wear his gold robe 
again. 

Past, long past two in the morning. The much- suffering House of 
Commons at last shut up, and deserted save by the police and the night 
watchmen. The last cabs in Palace Yard driven away : the charioteers 
grumbling horribly on their boxes, for they have members of Parlia- 
ment inside, who never pay more than the legal fare. Irish members 



372 



TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK:. 



■!! 




TWO A.M. — THE TUKXSTILE OF WATERLOO EHIDGE. 373 

walked round the corner to Manchester Buildings or Victoria Street, 
there dwelling. Some members do all but sleep in the House. As 
for the noble and defeated Viscount, he trots cheerily home — scorning 
either cab or carriage — shouldering his umbrella, as though nothing in 
the world had happened to ruffle his equanimity. 

And now, for the first time since this clock was set in motion, some- 
thing like a deep sleep falleth over London. Not that the city is all 
hushed ; it never is. There are night revellers abroad, night prowlers 
a-foot. There is houseless wretchedness knowing not where to hide 
its head ; there is furtive crime stalking about, and seeking whom it 
may devour. Yet all has a solemn, ghastly, unearthly aspect ; the 
gas-lamps flicker like corpse candles ; and the distant scream of a pro- 
fligate, in conflict with the police, courses up and down the streets in 
weird and shuddering echoes. 

The Strand is so still that you may count the footsteps as they 
sound ; and the pale moon looks down pityingly on the vast, feverish, 
semi- slumbering mass. Here we stand at length by Upper Wellington 
Street ; a minute's walk to the right will bring us to the " Bridge of 
Sighs." 

Which never sleeps ! Morning, and noon, and night, the sharp, 
clicking turnstile revolves ; the ever-wakeful tollman is there, with his 
preternaturally keen apron. I call this man Charon, and the river 
which his standing ferry bridges over might well be the Styx. Im- 
possible, immobile, indifferent, the gate-keeper's creed is summed up 
in one word — " A halfpenny !" Love, hope, happiness, misery, despair, 
and death — what are they to him? " A halfpenny for the bridge" is 
all he asks ! but " a halfpenny for the bridge " he must have. 

" Please, sir, will you give me a halfpenny for the bridge ? " A 
phantom in crinoline lays her hand on my arm. I start, and she 
hastens through the turnstile — 

" Anywhere, anywhere, 
Out of the world," 

perhaps. But I may not linger on the mysteries of the Bridge of 
Sighs. They are among the " Secrets of Gas," and the pictured sem- 
blance of the place here must content you. 



374 TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK. 



HOUR THE TWENTY-FOURTH AND LAST— THREE A.M.— 
A BAL MASQUE, AND THE NIGHT CHARGES AT 
BOW STREET. 

When the bad Lord Lyttelton lay on his last bed— thorn-strewn by 
conscience — and haunted by the awful prediction of the phantom 
which appeared to him in the semblance of a white dove, telling 
him that at a certain hour on a certain night he should die, some 
friends who had a modicum of human feeling, and wished that 
wicked lord well, thinking that his agony was caused by mere terror 
of an impending event — half nervous, half superstitious — advanced 
the hands of the clock One Hour, and when the fatal one, as it 
seemed, struck, his Lordship started up in bed, apparently much relieved, 
and cried out joyfully that he had "jockeyed the ghost." But when 
the real time arrived, and the real hour was stricken on the bell, the 
prediction of the white dove was verified, and the bad Lord Lyttelton, 
shrieking, gave up the ghost. 

Moral : there is not the slightest use in playing tricks with the 
clock. Were it otherwise, and were I not deterred by this awful 
warning in the case of Lord Lyttelton, I would entreat some kindly 
friend to stand on tiptoe, and just push the hour-hand of this clock of 
mine back, were it but for one poor stunde of sixty minutes. But in 
vain. As well ask Mr. Calcraft to postpone his quarter-to-eight visit 
with a new rope, when the law has consigned you to the tender mercies 
of that eminent functionary. As well may Crown Prince Frederick 
entreat the Governor of Ciistrin to defer the execution of wretched 
Lieutenant Katte, "till he can write to the king." As well may the 
unfortunate little Pants, hopelessly embroiled for the fifth time this 
morning with his Greek Delectus, implore the terrible Doctor Budd to 
spare him the rod this once. As well might I write to the Postmaster- 
General to say that it will not be convenient for me to deposit the last 
batch of newspapers in the window till half-past six p.m. ; or beg the 
London and North- Western Railway Company to delay the departure 
of the Manchester night express till I have finished my wine and 
walnuts at the Victoria Hotel, Euston Square. The fiat has gone 



THPcEE A.M. — A BAI MASQUE. 375 

forth. Missa est. Judgment is over, and execution is come ; and 

I may say, with Lord Grizzle in " Tom Thumb :" 

" My ." kruptfs shop, 

My grim creditor is death,' 3 

who. like a stern sergeant, lays his hand on my collar^ and bids me 
follow him to jail in the king's name. I wish I were Punch, for he 
not only " jockeyed" the ghost, but the hangman, and the beadle, and 

Mr. Shallabalah, and his wife, and the very deuce himself I wish 
I were in a land where time is indeed made for slaves, or where there 
are no clocks to cast honest men off their hobbies. 

" I wish I were :. g 
Foi they lives and lies in j : ; 
And acciraralates much y. 
OverUiere." 

But I am not a Punch nor a u geese." to endorse the touching trans- 
atlantic locution, however much I may merit the singular application 
of the name. I am only your humble servant to command, and this 
is the last hour of •'•' Twice Pound the deck." so I must e'en essay 
to make a good end of it. 

\Ye have not been so badly off for public amusements during our 
journeyings. "We have been to the theatre, a dancing- 

academy, and to hear an oratorio. We have supped at Evans's, and 
i; assisted '" at a late debate in the House of Commons ; yet I acknow- 
ledge, mournfully, that scores of places of recreation exist in London 
to which I could have taken you, and where we might have enjoyed 
ourselves very rationally and harmlessly. I should have liked to induct 
you to the mysteries of Canterbury Hall, the Polytechnic. Christy's 
Minstrels, and Madame TussaucVs waxwork show. For I hold to this 
creed, sternly and strongly, that public amusements — indoor and out- 
door amusements — are eminently conducive to public morals, and to 
the liberty and happiness of the people. Music, dancing, and dramatic 
representations, free from grossness and turbulence, are as healthful 
and innocent recreations as Temperance Halls, lectures on the comet's 
tail, or monster meetings dedicated to the deification of the odium 
iheohgicum. Prom my little parlour window at Brighton, I can see a 
huge yellow placard disfiguring a dead wall with this inscription :— 
"Protestants! attend the Great Meeting to-night!'" Bother the 
Protestants, (on platforms) I say. and the Pope of Rome too. What 



376 TV/ICE BOUND THE CLOCK:. 

have we done that we are to be perpetually set together by the ears by 
belligerent Protestants and rampant Romanists ? Is the whole frame- 
work of society to be shaken by controversies about the cardinal's red 
stockings or the rector's shovel hat ? They had best both be swept 
into the dust-hole, I think, as having no more to do with religion than 
my poodle, Buffo, has with the Gunpowder Plot. Will all these roaring 
meetings — Protestants and Eomanist, or Mumbo-Jumboical — where 
blatant stump-orators, paid for their theology by the night, rant, and 
stamp, and cook up those eternal Smithfield fires, help the sacred cause 
of Christianity one iota ? It is long since Sheridan expressed a hope 
that there might be no more u scandal about Queen Elizabeth," and 
now, I see, they can't let that poor old woman rest in her grave. 
Some zealous people want to get up a sort of rider to " Guy Fawkes's 
Day," to commemorate the tri-centenary of her accession. You stupid 
firebrands! Of course "the Reformation was a blessing;" but do 
you know what will be the result of this raking up of the Elizabethan 
scandal? Do you know that there are such books as "Cobbett's Legacy 
to Parsons," and " Lingard's History," besides "Foxe's Martyrs," and 
a " Thunderbolt for Rome"? Do you know that it may be proved 
just six of one and half-a-dozen of the other about Queen Bess ? that 
while to some she is the Great Protestant Sovereign, the Egeria of the 
Reformation, the Heroine of Tilbury Fort, to others she is a vain, cruel, 
arrogant old beldame, no better than she should be? who butchered 
Mary Stuart, and had Leicester poisoned ; and who for every Protestant 
her gloomy sister burned, had at least two Papists hanged, drawn, and 
quartered, with the pleasant addition of their entrails being torn out 
and consumed before their eyes ! Eh ! laisso?is la these horrible remi- 
niscences, and thank Heaven that we live under the sway of good 
Victoria, not that of ruthless Elizabeth or bloody Mary. Did the wise, 
and merciful, and bounteous Creator, who made this smiling earth, who 
has gladdened us with an infinity of good things for our solace and 
enjoyment, and for all quit-rent has laid this law upon us that we 
should love one another, in testimony of our greatest love for Him, 
who is all love and tenderness ; did He send us here to squabble and 
fight and predict eternal perdition to one another, because there fall 
into our hearts a differently-coloured ray of the divine Effulgence ? 
There is a flaming Protestant here with a broad-brimmed hat, and 
who is a vessel of much consequence among his fellow-bigots, who told 
an honest butcher some days since that if the Maynooth grant were 



THBEE A.M. A BAL MASQUE. 377 

renewed we should have "the thumbscrews in three months ;" where- 
upon the affrighted butcher plastered all his joints over with handbills 
of the great Protestant Meeting, thus, of course, losing all his customers 
of the other persuasion. I wish those bells which are eternally jangling 
invitations for us to come and thank Heaven that we are not " as that 
publican/' would ring a little tolerance and charity into men's hearts ; 
would ring out a little more oblivion of phylacteries and pew-rents in 
high places, and of the sepulchral whitewash brushes. If the people 
who make all this noise and clamour, and who howl out against rational 
amusements, led pure and virtuous lives, and set good examples to their 
neighbours, this voice should not be raised ; but, alas ! here is brother 
Dolorous at the bar of the court of Queen's Bench for peculation ; here 
is Sister Saintly scourging her apprentice ; here are Messrs. Over- 
righteous in trouble for adulteration of their wares. 

It is by no means incompatible, I hope, with the broad line 
of argument I have striven to adopt in these papers, if I honestly 
declare that the tableau I am about to describe has not in any way my 
approval, nay is, in many respects, much to be reprobated and deplored. 
I describe it — in its least repulsive details — simply because it is a very 
noticeable feature in modern London life. To have passed it over would 
have been dishonest and hypocritical, and I set it down in my catalogue 
of subjects at the outset of my task, actuated then, as I am now, by 
a determination to allow no squeamishness to interfere with the delinea- 
tion of the truth — so long as that truth could be told without offence 
to good manners and in household language. A modern masquerade 
in London is, to tell the honest truth, anything but an edifying spectacle. 
There is certainly no perceptible harm in some hundreds of persons, 
of both sexes, accoutred in more or less fantastic dresses, meeting 
together in a handsome theatre, and, to the music of a magnificent 
band, dancing till three or four o'clock in the morning. But the place 
is not harmless : people go there to dissipate, and do dissipate. The salle 
cle clause of a grand masquerade is a re-union of epicurean passions — an 
epitome of vice painted and spangled. And I take a masquerade trium- 
phantly as an argument against the precisians and sour-faces, who would 
curtail the amusements of the people, and viciously thwart them in their 
every effort to amuse themselves. Look you here, gentlemen of the 
vestry — arch moralists of the parish ! look you here, good Mr. Chaplain 
of Pentonville, who have got your pet garotter safe in hold for his sins ! 
This is no penny-gaff, no twopenny theatre, no cheap concert or dancing 



378 TWICE ROUND THE CEOCE. 

academy — not so much as a "free-and-easy" or a " sixpenny hop." 
Shopboys don't rob the till to come to a bal masque at her Majesty's 
Theatre. Your pet garotter didn't throttle the gentleman in the Old 
Kent Road in order to procure funds to dance with Mademoiselle 
Euphrosine de la G-alette, of the Eue Notre Dame de Lorette, Paris, 
and attired in a ravishing debardeur costume. There is, to be sure, 
a floating population of Bohemians — citizens of the world of London, 
belonging to the theatres, enfant s perdus of the newspaper press, and 
so on, who are admitted gratis to a fcnasquerade : these last Zouaves 
of social life, have free admission to coroners' inquests, public dinners, 
ship launches, private views of picture exhibitions, night rehearsals 
of pantomimes, and royal marriages. The modern newspaper man 
is, in print, the embodiment of Mr. Everybody ; in private he is 
Mr. Nobody, and doesn't count at all. Lord Derby is afraid of the 
journalist in print, but in the flesh his Lordship's footman would look 
down upon him. " Honly a littery man, let him knock agin," Jeames 
would say. So we go everywhere, even as though we were in the 
" receipt of fern seed." Even the House of Commons has invented 
a pleasant fiction for the benefit of the gentlemen of the press, and 
humorously ignores their presence during the debates. The Empress 
Julia bathed before her male slave. " Call that a man," she cried, 
contemptuously. In the like manner, no account is taken of the 
journalist's extra card of admission or extra knife and fork. He goes 
under the head of "sundries," though he makes sometimes a rather 
formidable figure in the aggregate. 

But to the general public — the social Zouaves are but a drop of 
water in the sea — a bal masque is a very expensive affair, and a luxury 
not to be indulged in without a liberal disbursement of cash. First, 
ticket, half a guinea. Mademoiselle de la Galette's ticket, if you be 
galant homme, five shillings more, if she be in costume ; half a guinea 
if in domino. Next, costume for yourself, variable according to its 
extravagance — a guinea at least. At any rate, if you are content to 
appear in plain evening dress, there are clean white kid gloves and 
patent leather boots to be purchased. And the supper ; and the wine, 
for champagne is de rigueur, at twelve and fifteen shillings a bottle ! 
(You will observe that whenever I grow fashionably dissipated, I begin 
to chatter French.) And Mademoiselle de la Galette's bouquet, and the 
intermediate refreshments, ices, coffee, lemonade, and what-not ; and the 
cabs and the wild revelry in the wicked Haymarket purlieus afterwards. 



THREE A.M. — A BAL MASQUE. cl L J 

You see I have led you to the very end of tjie chapter, and that a night 
at a bed metsquc will make an irremediable hole in a ten-pound note. 

For this reason the persons (of the male sex) who visit such a 
gathering must be divided into three classes : theatrical and literary 
nobodies, coming there for nothing and not caring much about the 
place now they are come ; young bucks about the town with more 
money than wit, who will exist, I am afraid, in every civilised age ; and 
lastly and chiefly, the " Swells." I use the term advisedly, for none 
other can so minutely characterise them. Long, stern, solemn, languid, 
with drooping tawny moustaches, with faultlessly made habiliments, 
with irreproachable white neckcloths, with eyes half-closed, with pendant 
arms, with feet enclosed in mirror-like patent boots, the " swells " 
saunter listlessly through the ball-room with a quiet consciousness that 
all these dazzling frivolities are provided for their special gratification 
— which indeed they are. As it is feed du meriire qui engraisse le 
cheval, so it is the Ci swell*' who makes the bal masque pay. Never so 
many orders may SDc. Nugent give away; but if the "-swell" be not 
in town or muster not in force on the eventful night, there will be 
wailing in her Majesty's Theatre, and woe in M. Jullien's cash-box. 
It must be somewhat of a strong till that can stand this tiredUement. 
As regards the ladies who are the partners in the mazy dance of these 
splendid cavaliers, I may say, once for all, that they are Daughters 
of Folly : Mademoiselle de la Galette and her condisciples, English and 
French, are there, multipled nve-hundred fold. I don't think your pet 
garotter, good Mr. Chaplain, would be very successful as a Hercules at 
the feet of these Omphales. 

I wonder how many sons and scions, or cousins or nephews, or mul- 
titudinous misty offshoots of the titled men who govern us, who own 
our lands, our waters, and the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, 
and the fish of the sea, are here. I wonder how many threads of con- 
nection there are in this ball-room theatre between these butterflies and 
the ermine and the lawn of the House of Peers. How many, how 
much 1 Bah ! There is young Eeginald Fitzmitre, the Bishop of Bos- 
fursus's son, talking to that charming titi in the striped silk skirt and 
crimson satin trousers. Eeginald is in the Guards. Bishops' sons are 
fond of going into the Guards. Yonder is little Pulex, whose brother, 
Tapely Pulex, is Under-Secretary for the Egregious Department. There 
Lord Claude Mifnn has just stalked in with Sir Charles Shakeypegs 
(who is old enough to know better) ; and upon my word, here comes 



350 



TWICE EOUlsD THE CEOCII, 





mUmmm mtmmBmM 




THREE A.M. — A BAL MASQUE. 33 I 

that venerable sinner Lord Hollo-way, with little Fanny Claypainter on 
his arm. It won't do, my Lord ; you may disguise yourself as closely 
as you will in a domino and a mask with a long lace beard, but I know 
you by that side-wise waggle of your Lordship's head. The Earl of 
Holloway has been a very gay nobleman in his time. He married 
Hiss Redpoll, the famous English contraltro, drew her theatrical salary 
with very great punctuality every Saturday afternoon at three o'clock, 
and beat her, people said. He was the honourable Jack Pilluler then. 
Years elapsed before he came into the title and Unguenton Park. She 
died. Advance, then— advance then, my noble swells — to adopt the 
style of the gentlemen with the thimble and pea. Advance, this is all 
for your delectation. ATean while, let your most noble and right reverend 
fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins meet in either House of Par- 
liament, meet at Quarter Sessions, or on borough bench, and make or 
expound laws against the wicked, thriftless, hardened, incorrigibly 
dissipated Poor. No beer for them, the rogues! No fairs, no wakes, 
no village feasts, no harvest-homes, no theatres, concerts, dances, no 
tobacco, no rabbits, no bowls, no cricket — but plenty of law, and plenty 
of nice hard labour, and wholesome gruel, and strengthening stone- 
breaking, and plenty of your sweet aristocratic wives and daughters 
to force their w T ay into poor men's cottages, ask them questions for 
which I wonder they don't get their ears boxed, pry into their domestic 
concerns, peep into their cupboards, and wonder at their improvidence 
in not having more to eat and drink therein. 

Stand we in the orchestral hemicycle, and watch the garish, motley 
scene. Questions of morality apart, one must have jaundiced eyes to 
deny that, as a mere spectacle, it is brilliant and picturesque enough. 
All that M. Jullien's bizarre taste and fancy could suggest, or the cun- 
ning skill of experienced scenic decorators carry out, has been done here 
to make the place gay, dazzling, and effective. Wreaths of artificial 
flowers, reflecting the highest credit upon the paper-stainer and the 
paper-cutter's art, mask the somewhat fames ornaments of the tiers of 
boxes ; homely corridors and staircases are pleasantly disguised under 
a plentitude of scarlet baize and drugget ; the chandelier is of abnor- 
mous size, for any number of glittering festoons have been added to its 
crystal abacot ; devices in glass and devices in gas twinkle and radiate 
on every side : nor is music's voluptuous swell wanting to incite us to 
" chase the glowing hours with flying feet," and make all things go 
" merry as a marriage bell." 



382 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

Truly, that well-packed orchestra deserves a more dignified arena 
for its exertions than this vulgar dancing-place. A jangling harp, a 
wheezy flute, and a cracked-voice violin, with perhaps a dingy old 
drum, with two perpetual black eyes in its parchment cheeks where the 
stick hits them, like the wife of an incorrigibly drunken cobbler — in-, 
struments such as you may hear tortured any night outside the Moguls 
in Drury Dane : these would be quite good enough for the ruffiani (by 
which I do not at all mean "ruffians ") and bona robas of a masquerade 
to dance to. But this orchestra, numerous as it is, is composed of picked 
men : it is an imperial guard of veterans in fiddling, bassooning, and 
cornet-a-pistoning. Even the gentleman who officiates at the triangle, 
is a solo player ; and the fierce-looking foreigner who attends to the 
side-drums, is the most famous tambour in Europe. At beating the 
chamade he stands alone, and his roll is unrivalled. With shame I 
speak it : you shall find among these artists in wind and artists in string 
instruments, horns, and clarionettes, tenors and second violins, who ? 
during the opertic season, are deemed not unworthy to be ruled by the 
Prospero wand of the kid-gloved Costa or swayed by the magic fiddle- 
stick of the accomplished Alfred Mellon. A pretty vocation for them 
to have to fiddle and blow for the amusement of ne'er-do-weels in torn- 
fools' costumes, and bold-faced jigs in velvet trousers ! Why, they 
could take their parts in the symphonies of Beethoven and the masses 
of Mozart. And thou, too, Jullien the Superb, maestro of the am- 
brosial ringlets, the softly-luxuriant whiskers and moustaches, gracilis 
puer of the embroidered body-linen, the frogged pantaloons, the coat 
with moire antique facings, the diamond studs and sleeve buttons! 
couldst thou not find a worthier tilt-yard for thy chivalrous gambadoes ? 
Alas ! to some men, howsoever talented, charlatanism seems to adhere 
like a burr, and will not depart, Jullien must have caught this stain 
at the battle of Kavarino or at the Jardin Turc, and it has abided by 
him ever since. There is not the slightest necessity for this clever, 
kindly, and really accomplished musician — to whom the cause of good 
and even classical music in England owes much — to be a quack ; but I 
suppose he can't help it. He was born under a revolving firework star, 
and would introduce blue fire in the Dead March in " Saul." So it is 
with many. They could be Abernethies, but they prefer being Dul- 
camaras ; they could be Galileos or Copernici, they prefer the fame of 
Cagliostro or Katterfelto. There was poor dear Alexis Soyer, as kind a 
hearted Christian as you might find, an admirable cook, an inventive 



THREE A.M. A EAL MASQUE. 383 

genius, a brave, devoted, self-denying man, who served his adopted 
country better in the Crimea than many a starred and titled C.B. He 
had no call to be a quack ; there was no earthly reason why he should 
inundate the newspapers with puffs, and wear impossible trousers, or 
cloth-of-gold waistcoats, cut diagonally. The man had a vast natural 
capacity, could think, ay, and do things ; yet he quacked so continually, 
that many people set him down as a mere shallow pretender, and some 
even doubted whether he could cook at all. He was, nevertheless, a 
master of his difficult art, though in his latter days he did not exercise 
it much. Grrisier grew tired of fencing. Wordsworth did not write 
much after he was laureate. Sir Edwin's brush is passing idle now. 
But I have partaken of succulent dainties cooked in their daintiest 
manner by the cunning hands of the illustrious chef : and I tell you 
that he could cook, when he chose, like St. Zita, the patroness of the 
Genoese ciiisinieres. And I think I know, and that I can tell, a 
compote from a cow-heel, having dined as well and as ill, in my time, 
as any man of my age and standing. 

What shall I say of the moving, living, kaleidoscope, twinkling 
and coruscating in the vast enceinte ? Indeed, it is very difficult to 
say anything about the outward similitude of a bed masque that has 
not been said a hundred tidies before. Tou have taken for granted 
the very considerable admixture of plain evening costume, worn by 
the swells et autres, which speckles the galaxy of gay costumes with 
multitudinous black dots* After this, we all know what to expect^ 
and whom to find. Paint, patches, spangles, and pearl-powder, tawdry 
gold and silver (more brassy and pewtery, rather, I opine), and sham 
point lace. Sham fox-hunters, mostly of a Hebrew cast of countenance, 
in tarnished scarlet coats, creased buckskins, and boots with tops guilt- 
less of oxalic acid, brandishing whips that have oftener been laid 
across their own shoulders than on the flanks of the "screws" they 
have bestridden ; and screening their mouths with palms covered by du- 
bious white kid gloves, or with bare dirt-inlaid knuckles protuberant 
with big rings of mosaic jewellery, shouting " Yoicks," and "Hark- 
away," in nasal accents. Undergraduates, in trencher caps and trailing 
gowns, worn by jobbernols, who know far more about Oxford Street 
than the University of Oxford. Barristers, more likely to be pleaded 
for than to plead. Bartlemy-Fair Field ^Marshals, in costumes equally 
akin to his who rides on the lamentable white horse before the Lord 
Mayor's gingerbread coach, and Bombastes Furioso in the farce. Charles 



384 TWICE KOTJXD THE CLOCK. 

the Seconds, with all the dissolute effrontery of that monarch, but of 
his wit or merriment none. Red Rovers and Conrad Corsairs, whose 
nautical adventures have been confined to a fracas on board a penny- 
steamboat; Albanian, and Sciote, and Suliote Chiefs, with due fez, kilt, 
yataghan, and lambrochines, in orthodox " snowy camise and shaggy 
capote," and who act their characters in a likelier manner than their 
comrades, for they are, the majority, arrant " Greeks." A few Bedouin 
Arabs — a costume picturesque yet inexpensive : a pen'north of Spanish 
liquorice to dye the face withal ; a couple of calico sheets, for caftan 
and burnous, with the tassel of a red worsted bell-pull or so to finish 
off with, and you have your Abd-el-Kader complete. Half-a-dozen 
Marquises, of Louis the Fifteenth's time. Plenty of Monks : robes 
and cagonles of gray linen, a rope for a girdle, a pennyworth of wooden 
beads for a rosary, and slippers cut down into sandals — these are as 
cheap as effective. A Knight, in complete armour (pasteboard with 
tin-foil glued thereupon) ; a Robinson Crusoe, always getting into 
piteous dilemmas, with his goatskin (worsted) umbrella ; a Bear, a 
Demon, and a Chinese Mandarin. When I have enumerated these, 
I find that I have noticed the travestisements most prevalent among 
the English male portion of the costumed mob. But there is another 
very appreciable element in these exhibitions : the foreign one. A 
century has passed since Johnson told us, in his mordant satire of 
" London," that England's metropolis was — 

" The needy villain's general home, 
The common sew'r of Paris and of Rome." 

It is astonishing to find how much foreign riff-raff and alien scoun- 
drelry will turn up at a masquerade. Leicester Square and Panton 
Street, the cloaques of the Haymarket and Soho, disgorge the bearded 
and pomatumed scum of their stale fiot-au-feu-smellmg purlieus on this 
dancing floor. They come with orders, and don't sup ; rather hover 
about the Daughters of Folly and Sons of Silliness, to wheedle and 
extort odd silver sums, with w T hich to gamble at atrocious " nicks," 
and tobacco-enveloped gambling dens in Leicesterian slums, yet un- 
rooted out by lynx-eyed policemen. Homer not unfrequently nods in 
Scotland Yard. " None are so blind as those that won't see," wiiisper 
the wicked. These foreigners — shameless, abandoned rogues, mostly 
throwing undeserved discredit upon honest, harmless forestieri ; fellows 
who are "known to the police" in Paris, and have a second home at 
the Depot de la Prefecture — affect the cheap, but thoroughly masquer- 



THREE A.M. — A BAL MASQUE. 385 

ade costume of the Pierrot. Very easy of accomplishment, this disguise. 
About one and ninepence outlay would suffice, it seemeth to me. Jerkin 
of white calico, with immoderately long sleeves, like those of a camisole 
de force unfastened ; galligaskins of the same snowy cheapness, and 
scarlet slippers ; any number of tawdry calico bows of any colour down 
the sides, a frill round the neck, where the " jougs" of the pillory or 
the collar of the garotte should be ; the face, that should be seared with 
the hangman's brand, thickly plastered with flour, so that there would 
be no room for the knave to blush, even if the light hand of a transient 
conscience smote him on the cheek and bade him remember that he 
once had a mother, and was not always aide-de-camp in waiting to 
Beelzebub ; a conical cap of pasteboard, like an extinguisher snowed 
upon ; here you have the Pierrot. The Englishman sometimes attempts 
him, but generally fails in the assumption. In order to " keep-up" 
the character well, it is necessary to play an infinity of monkey -tricks, 
to bear kicking with cheerful equanimity, to dance furiously, and to 
utter a succession of shrill screams at the end of every dance. Else 
you are no true Pierrot; and these elegancies are foreign to our 
phlegmatic manners. 

Another favourite costume with the bal masque is that of the 
" Postilion de Longjumeau." He is as well-nigh extinct in France, 
by this chiming, as our own old English post-boys. Railways shunted 
him off on to oblivion's sidings with terrible rapidity. Only, his 
Imperial Highness Prince Jerome Napoleon — whom the Parisians per- 
sist in calling "l'Oncle Tom," because, say they, Napoleon I., his 
brother, was " le grand homme" Napoleon III., his nephew, " le petit 
homme" so this must be necessarily " T oncle-t-homme " — or Tom — 
this mediocre old gentleman, who throughout his long life has always 
been fortunate enough to be lodged, and boarded, and pensioned at 
other peoples' expense (they positively carved out a kingdom for him 
once), still keeps up a staff of postilions de Longjumeau^ who, with 
much bell-ringing, whip-cracking, and "ha! heu hooping!" guide his 
fat, white, hollow-backed Norman post-horses, when his Imperial High- 
ness goes down to St. Cloud or Chantilly in his travelling carriage. It 
is a quaint, not unbecoming costume : glazed hat, the brim built at an 
angle, broad gold band, cockade as big as a pancake, and multicoloured 
streamers of attenuated ribbon ; short wig, with club well powdered ; 
jacket with red facings and turn-up two-inch tails ; saucepan-lid buttons, 
and metal badge on the left arm ; scarlet vest, double breasted ; buck- 



386 TWICE BOUND THE CLOGS. 

skins, saffron-dyed ; high boots with bucket tops, and greased, mind, 
not blacked; long spurs, and whip insignificant as to stock and 
tremendous as to lash. This is his Imperial Highness's postilion, and 
this, minus the spurs, is the postilion of the bal masque. 

And the ladies? I am reticent. I am nervous. I draw back. 
" I don't like/' as the children say. Hie you to the National Gallery, 
and look at Turner's picture of " Phryne going to the bath as Venus." 
Among the wild crew of bacchantes and psoropophce who surround that 
young person, you will find costumes as extravagant of hues, as varie- 
gated, as strike the senses here. Only, among the masqueraders you 
must not look for harmony of colour or symmetry of line. All is 
jarring, discordant, tawdry, and harlequinadish. You are in error if 
you suppose I am about to descant at length on the glittering semi- 
nudities gyrating here. Go to, you naughty queans ! you must find 
some other inventory-maker. Go and mend your ways, buy horsehair 
corsets, "disciplines" and skulls if you will, and repair to the desert, 
there to mortify yourselves. Alas ! the hussies laugh at me, and tell 
me that the only manner in which they choose to tolerate horsehair is 
en crinoline. Go to, and remember the fate of a certain Janet Some- 
body — I forget her surname — condemned by some Scotch elders, in the 
early days of the Eeformation, to stripes and the stocks, for assuming 
a (i pair of breeks." Alack ! the debardeurs only mock me, and tell 
me that I am a fogey. 

Three quasi-feminine costumes there are, however, that shall be 
pilloried here. There is the young lady in a riding-habit, who is so 
palpably unaccustomed to wearing such a garment, who is so piteously 
ill-at-ease in it, not knowing how to raise its folds with Amazonian 
grace, and tripping herself up at eYerj fourth step or so, that she is 
more ridiculous than offensive. There is the " Middy :" a pair of w^hite 
trousers, a turn-clown collar, a round jacket, and a cap with a gold-lace 
band, being understood to fulfil all the requirements of that costume. 
The " middy " sneaks about in a most woeful state of sheep-leggedness, 
or, at most, essays to burst into delirious gymnastics, which end in 
confusion and contumely. And last, and most abhorrent to me, there 
is the "Romp." Romps in their natural state — in a parlour, on a 
lawn, in a swing, at a game of blind-man's-buff, or hunt-the-slipper — 
no honest man need cavil at. I like romps myself, when they don't 
pull your hair too hard, have some mercy on your toes, and refrain 
from calling you a " cross, grumpy, old thing," when you mildly suggest 



THREE A.M. — A EAL MASQUE. 387 

that it is very near bed-time. But a romp of some twenty-five years of 
age, with a cadaverous face, rouged, with a coral necklace, flaxen tails, 
a pinafore, a blue sash, Vandyked trousers, bare arms, and a skipping- 
rope : take away that romp, I say, quickly, somebody, and bring me 
a Gorgon or a Fury, the Hottentot Yenus or the Pig-faced Lady ! Any- 
thing for a change. Away with that romp, and cart her speedily to 
the nearest boarding-school where a lineal descendant of Mother Brown- 
rigge yet wields her birchen sceptre. 

It is on record that Thomas Carlyle, chiefest among British prose 
writing men, once in his life was present, in this very theatre, at a per- 
formance of the Italian Opera. He stayed the ballet, even, and went 
away full of strange cogitations. I would give one of my two ears (for 
be it known to you I am stone-deaf on the left side, like most men who 
have led evil lives in their youth, and could, wearing my hair long, 
well spare the superfluous flap of flesh and gristle) if I could persuade 
Thomas to visit a masquerade. There would be a new chapter in the 
next edition of " Sartor Resartus" to a certainty. For all these varied 
fopperies and fineries, dominoes, battered masks with ragged lace, sham 
orris, draggle-tailed feathers, tin-bladed rapiers, rabbit-skin and rat's-tail 
ermine, cotton velvet/ 'pinked" stockings, frayed epaulettes, mended skirts 
—all suggest pregnant thoughts of the Bag. Tout cela sent son mar- 
chand d? habits. Not to be driven away is the pervading notion of Old 
Clothes of Vinegar Yard and the ladies' wardrobe shop, of the ultimate 
relegation of these saliow r fripperies to Petticoat Lane and Rag Fair. Nor 
wuthout histories — some grave, some gay, some absurd, some terrible — 
must be these mended shreds of gaudy finery. They have been worn by 
aristocratic striplings at Eton Montem — defunct saturnalia of patrician 
"cadging." Those dim brocades and Swiss shepherdess corsages, have 
graced the forms of the fair-haired daughters of nobles at fancy balls. 
Great actresses, or cantatrici, have declaimed or sung in those satins, 
before they were disdainfully cast by, abandoned to the dresser, sold to 
the Jew costumier, cut down into tunics or pages' shoulder cloaks, fur- 
bished up with new tags and trimmings. Real barristers and gay young 
college lads have worn those wigs and gowns and trencher caps ; real 
captains have flaunted at reviews in those embroidered tunics and 
epaulettes ; swift horses have borne those scarlet coats and buckskins 
acrcss country, but with real fox-hunters inside. Where are the original 
possessors ? Drowned, or shot to death, or peacefully mouldering, in- 
solvent, or abroad, gone up to the Lords, or hanged. Who knows 1 



388 TWICE HOUND THE CLOCK. 

Perhaps they are lounging here as Swells, not recognising their old 
uniforms and academics, now worn by sham Abraham men and franc- 
mitous. Who can tell ? Where is the pinafore of our youth,- and the 
first shooting jacket of adolescence ? " Ou sont les neiges d'antan ? " 
Where are the last winter's snows ? 

But Thomas Carlyle wouldn't come to this place, at his age and at 
this time in the morning ; and, between you and me, I think it high 
time that we too should depart. In truth, the place is growing any- 
thing but orderly. Champagne and incessant exercise on the " light 
fantastic toe " have done their w r ork. Dances of a wild and incoherent 
character, reminding one of the " Chaloupe" the " Tulipe Orageuse" 
and the much-by-municipal-authorities-abhorred u Cancan" are at- 
tempted. The masters of the ceremonies seem laudably desirous of 
clearing the salle. Let us procure our great-coats, and flee from 
Babylon before the masquers grew unroarious. 

A stream of masquerading humanity, male and female, begins to 
pour through the corridors and so out beneath the portico. It is 
time. Cabs and broughams — the " swells " came in the broughams 
— sly, wicked little inventions ; policemen hoarsely shout and linkmen 
dart about. 

I thought so. I knew how it would end. A row, of course. That 
big Postilion de Longjumeau has borne it with admirable temper for 
hours ; but the conduct of the Charles the Second Cavalier has been 
beyond human forbearance. She — the cavalier is a she — has incited 
the Pierrot (an Englishman, for a w r onder, and hopelessly gone in cham- 
pagne) to knock the postilion down. He wept piteously at first, but, 
gathering courage, and not liking, perhaps, to be humiliated in the 
eyes of a debar deur in claret-coloured velvet, he kicked up wildly at 
the aggressor with his boots. Then the cavalier scratched his face; 
then the claret-coloured debardeur fainted ; then Mr. Edward Clyfaker, 
of Charles Street, Drury Lane, thief, cut in cleverly from between the 
wheels of a carriage, and picked Lord Holloway's pocket of Miss Clay- 
painter's cambric handkerchief; then A 22 drew r his truncheon and hit 
an inoffensive fox-hunter a violent blow on the head ; then four medical 
students called out "Fire !" and an inebriated costermonger, who had 
not been to the masquerade at all, but was quietly reeling home, chal- 
lenged Lord Claude Miffin to single combat; then Ned Eaggabones 
and Robin Barelegs, street Arabs, threw "cart-wheels" into the midst 



THREE A.M. — THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET. 389 




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390 TWICE HOTJXD THE CLOCK. 

of the throng ; then the police came down in great force, and, after 
knocking a great many people about who were not in the slightest 
degree implicated in the disturbance, at last pitched upon the right 
parties, and bore the pugnacious Pierrot and the disorderly Cavalier off 
to the station-house. It is but due to the managers of the masquerade 
to state, that no such scandalous melees take place within the precincts 
of the theatre itself. The masters of the ceremonies and the police on 
duty take care of that : but such little accidents will happen, outside, 
after the best-regulated masquerades. 

To the station-house, then, to the abode of captivity and the hall 
of justice. The complaining postilion and his friends, accompanied by 
a motley procession of tag-rag and bob-tail, press triumphantly forward. 
Shall we follow also ? 

In a commodious gas-lit box, surrounded by books and papers, and 
with a mighty folio of loose leaves open before him — a book of Fate, in 
truth — sits a Rhadanianthine man, buttoned up in a great-coat often ; 
for be it blazing July or frigid December, it is always cold at three 
o'clock in the morning. Not a very pleasant duty his : sitting through 
the long night before that folio, smoking prohibited, warm alcoholic 
liquids only, I should suppose, to be surreptitiously indulged in : sitting 
only diversified by an occasional sally into the "night air, to visit the 
policemen on their various beats, and learn what wicked deeds are 
doing this night and morning — a deputy taking charge of the folio 
meanwhile. Duty perhaps as onerous as that of the Speaker of the 
House of Commons : but, ah ! not half so wearisome. For the Rhada- 
manthine man in the great-coat has betimes to listen to tales of awful 
murder, of desperate burglaries, of harrowing suicides, of poverty and 
misery that make your soul to shudder and your heart to grow sick ; 
and sometimes to more jocund narratives— harum-scarum escapades, 
drunken freaks, impudent tricks, ingenious swindles, absurd jealousy, 
quarrels, and the like. But they all — be the case murder, or be it 
mouse-trap stealing — are entered on that vast loose folio, which is the 
charge-sheet, in fact ; Rhadamanthine man in great-coat being but the 
inspector of police on night duty, sitting here at his grim task for some 
fifty or sixty shillings a week. Harder task than sub-editing a news- 
paper even, I am of opinion. 

He has had a busy time since nine last evening. One by one the 
" charges " were brought in, and hour after hour, and set before him in 
that little iron-railed dock. Some were felonious charges : scowling, 



THREE A.M. THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET. 391 

beetle-browed, under-hung charges, who had been there many times 
before, and were likely to come there many times again. A multiplicity 
of Irish charges, too : beggars, brawlers, pavement-obstructors — all 
terribly voluble and abusive of tongue ; many with squalid babies 
in their arms. One or two such charges are lying now, contentedly 
drunken heaps of rags, in the women's cells. Plenty of juvenile 
charges, mere children, God help them ! swept in and swept out ; 
sometimes shot into cells — their boxes of fusees, or jagged broom- 
stumps, taken from them. A wife-beating charge ; ruffianly carver, 
who has been beating his wife with the leg of a pianoforte. The 
wretched woman, all blood and tears, is very reluctant, even now, to 
give evidence, and entreats the inspector to "let Bill go ; he didn't 
mean no harm." But he is locked up, departing to durance with the 
comforting assurance to his wife that he will, " do for her/' at the 
first convenient opportunity. I daresay he will, when his six months' 
hard labour are over. There was a swell-mob charge, too, a dandy 
de premiere force, who swaggered, and twisted his eye-glass, and sucked 
his diamond ring while in the dock, and declared he knew nothing of 
the gentleman's watch, he was "shaw." He broke down, however, 
while being searched, and on the discovery of the watch — for he had 
missed the confederate who usually " covered" him — subsided into bad 
language, and the expression of a hope that he might not be tried by 
" old B ram well," meaning the learned judge of that name. Short 
work has been made with some of these charges, while the dis- 
posal of others has occupied a considerable time. As the night grew 
older, the drunk and disorderly and drunk and incapable charges 
began to drop in ; but one by one they have been disposed of in a 
calm, business-like manner, and the " charges " are either released, or, 
if sufficient cause were apparent for their detention, are sleeping off 
their liquor, or chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancies, in the 
adjacent cells. 

" I thought the ball mask]/ would bring us some work," the in- 
spector remarks to the sergeant, as the Pierrot is carried, and the 
cavalier is dragged, and the postilion and his friend stalk indignantly 
- — the whole accompanied by a posse of police, into the station : " Xow, 
then, F 29, what is it ?" 

F, or X, or Z, or whatever may be his distinguishing letter or nume- 
ral, gives a succint narrative of the row, so far as he is acquainted with 
its phases, very much in the style of the Act a" Accusation of a French 



392 TWICE EOUND THE CLOCK. 

procurear imperial, which is always as damaging as it conveniently can 
be made against the person in custody. The postilion follows with his 
statement, the cavalier breaks in with an indignant denial of all he has 
said, violently insists upon charging the postilion with murder and 
assault, and ultimately expresses a desire to know what he, the in- 
spector, thinks of himself, a wish to tear F 29's eyes out, and ardent 
ambition to '-polish off the whole lot." iC Don't all speak at once," 
remonstrates the inspector, but they will all speak at once, and the 
Pierrot, waking up from an intoxicated trance, asseverates, in broken 
accents, that he is a " p-p-p-p-pro-f-f-fessional man, and highly res-pe-pe- 
p-pectable," and then sinks quiescent over the front of the dock, in an 
attitude very much resembling that sometimes assumed by the cele- 
brated Mr. Punch. 

" There, take him away," says the municipal functionary, pointing 
with sternly contemptuous finger to the Pierrot. " And take her 
away," he adds, designating the cavalier. " And you, sir," he con- 
tinues, to the postilion, " sign your name and address there, and take 
care to be at the court at ten in the morning. And I should advise 
you to go straight home, or you'll be here again shortly, with somebody 
to take care of you. I wonder whether we shall have any more," he 
says wearily, to his sergeant, as the captives are removed, and the room 
is cleared. 

It does not so much matter, for the third hour is gone and past, 
and as we emerge into the street, the clock of St. Paul's strikes Fouk. 
There ! the twenty -four hours are accomplished, and we ha^e pro- 
gressed, however lamely and imperfectly, " Twice Bound the Clock." 
Good-bye, dear readers — pleasant companions of my labours. Good- 
bye, troops of shadowy friends and shadowy enemies, whose hand- 
writing — in praise, in reproach, in condolence, in sympathy, in jest, 
and in earnest — is visible enough to me on many pages laying open 
before me at this moment, but whose faces I shall never see on this 
side the grave. Your smiles and frowns henceforward belong to the 
past, for my humble task is achieved, and the Clock is Stopped. 



THE END. 



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